


Goretober 2020

by TalesOfOnyxBats



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Once Upon a Time (TV), Robin Hood (BBC 2006), Voltron: Legendary Defender, W.I.T.C.H., Winx Club
Genre: Abduction, Abuse, Alien Abduction, Aliens, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Apocalypse, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Broken Bones, Buried Alive, Burns, Candy Gore, Cannibalism, Car Accidents, Character Death, Crystals, Death, Delusions, Drug Use, Execution, Eyes, F/F, F/M, Fruit, Fruit Gore, Fusion, Gen, Gore, Goretober, Goretober 2020, Hearts, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Injury Recovery, Insanity, Magical Drugs, Mutant, Mutant Powers, Mutation, Nature, Nature Horror, Nightmares, Parasites, Poison, Post-Apocalypse, Psychological Torture, Public Execution, Punishment, Recreational Drug Use, Redemption, Revenge, Self-Harm, Self-Mutilation, Suicide, Torture, Transformation, Trees, Vampires, Werewolves, Witch - Freeform, Zombie Apocalypse, bones - Freeform, burned alive, glass, plant growth, suffocation, toxins
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:34:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 21
Words: 33,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26805940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TalesOfOnyxBats/pseuds/TalesOfOnyxBats
Summary: A collection of prompts from tumblr user Davhacourt's Goretober 2020. Various fandoms and themes, with uncensored gore. From a werewolf Bellatrix to Azula candygore.
Relationships: Aang/Azula (Avatar), Azula & Jet (Avatar), Baatar Jr./Kuvira (Avatar), Evil Queen | Regina Mills/Emma Swan, Evil Queen | Regina Mills/Red Riding Hood | Ruby, Isabella Of Gisborn/Thornton (Robin Hood 2006), Korra/Kuvira (Avatar), Scabior/Bellatrix Lestrange
Comments: 57
Kudos: 24





	1. Sapphire Flecks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt 3: Parasite  
> Fandom: Once Upon A Time  
> Summary: Regina finds odd flakes of blue under her nails and in her hair. Flakes that turn out to be small parasites.

They burrow under nails and into the follicles of hair. She first sees them appear as small flames of blue, like chips of sapphire. They look almost beautiful as they tear her apart. So beautiful that she doesn’t think anything of it really. They make her hair and nails shimmer and glint when caught in the sun. 

It’s a strange thing really, Regina finds herself sitting at her desk, holding her hand out in front of her and twisting it ever so slightly, observing the way the sunlight bounces off of the flakes. Her brows knit as she tries to deduce where they had come from, why they have appeared.

It isn’t something that goes unnoticed and days from when they first appeared she thinks that they are spreading. It is Mary who mentions it first, the curious way that her eyes seem to light up even when she isn’t particularly happy. 

She wonders if they might be some residue of ancient magic. Something that she’d picked up when cleaning out her mausoleum. That is the only thing she can think of. She gives a soft jolt at the sound of the door opening. “Emma.” She greets without looking up. She knows those footsteps all too well, has learned to distinguish the pattern of them from the gait of others. 

“Just thought I’d drop off lunch since you’ve been forgetting about it.” She drops a takeout box in front of her. “Seriously, you can’t just skip lunch all the time…”

Regina rolls her eyes. “Sometimes I get busy.”

“By sometimes, you mean every day this week?” 

Regina puts her pen down and pushes the sheet of paper to the side. 

“See, that’s a start.” Emma flashes a mischievous grin and Regina goes tense. Small flecks of blue speckle the woman’s teeth. She tilts her head slightly and furrows her brows. “What are you staring at?” Emma asks. 

“You...you have them too.”

Now Emma’s brows furrow. “Have what, Regina?”

She holds up her hand. “The blue spots.”

“Where?”

“They’re on your teeth.” 

Emma shrugs. “Didn’t notice.” She gives pause. “Are they dangerous?”

Regina glances at her hands again and shakes her head. “They just...they’re strange, Emma. I’ve combed through all of my magic books, I’ve browsed the Storybrooke library; I can’t find anything about them.”

“But they don’t do anything?”

“Nothing but glisten and draw unwanted attention.” 

**.oOo.**

They haven’t changed in size yet they feel heavier. It was subtle at first, but now she can barely lift her hands. They feel so heavy. She isn’t sure of her muscles have weakened or if the blue flakes have an unseen weight. It is taxing to brush her thumb over her nail. But she does it and she feels it, they seem raised, teeny bumps on her nails. 

Her hair doesn’t move right either. It is thicker, more like stone than hair. But it moves, not with a passing breeze nor with motions she makes but it shifts on its own. Maybe ‘on its own’ isn’t he right term those small sapphire chips are moving them, she can’t see it but she knows it all the same.

Her stomach tightens with nerves. She can’t focus on her work because she swears that she can feel them shifting in her nails too. Even if she could concentrate, picking up a pen and dragging it across the paperwork...her hand is already cramping. 

Her mind is tired, her body exhausted and her eyes feel heavy with the feeling. 

She wakes to a firm shake and has only the energy to turn her head. “Emma?” She murmurs. It is all that she manages before falling away again. 

There is a scratching in her throat, a tickling sensation that accompanies her into sleep. 

She wakes in her bed with Emma rubbing small circles on her back. “I’m worried about you, Gina…”

She is growing concerned herself but she finds herself too sleepy to care. “Are they bigger, Emma?”

Her brows knit in confusion. 

She tries to lift her hand to show her but it is pinned to the mattress. She has trouble lifting her head. And her eyes, oh God, her eyes. The lids of them are like sandpaper. Sandpaper that only adds to the sting that is already there. 

She can feel the chips now, they rest like small woodchips in her eyes. 

“Are you talking about the flecks?”

“Yes.”

Emma lifts her hand. She tries anyways. “What…?” She mutters to herself. “No they aren’t bigger but…”

“I know, I can’t lift them either.” She pauses. “They’re in my throat. They’re so heavy.” 

**.oOo.**

She is decaying, they are siphoning her life from her. They don’t grow in size, but their weight is now crushing. She thinks that her bones may crack if they haven’t already. Her cheek is pressed so hard into the pillow that she feels as though she may fuse with it. She has heard of such things happening; people bed-ridden for so long that they begin to fuse with their sofas. Regina shudders. She wants to move but they hold her down.

“Take them out, Emma.” She says one day when she can bear the itching and scratching no more. 

Maybe if she plucks them, then some pressure will leave. Maybe she’ll be able to lift her head.

They’re useless anyways. They no longer see, not well anyhow. It is as though a blue film has been fixed over her retinas. 

And that film is barbed and razored. 

She blinks and the burning intensifies. She thinks that it will be less painful to have them removed entirely. Had she the use of her hands she would have clawed them out herself already. “Emma, please…” She wants to cry but she is afraid to. Terrified that her tears will come out with a sensation of acid running down her cheeks. 

“Take what out, Regina?”

“My eyes. It’ll hurt less if you do.” Her voice is so hoarse, those blue freckles, those beautiful blue flecks are probably scraping and wearing her throat away. Or it might be that she is simply hoarse with agony. 

“I’m not going to do that Reg…”

“I can see anyways. I only see blue…”

She feels Emma’s hand cup over hers. A wave of dread comes over her. “Emma, your teeth. Are the flakes still there?”

“Yeah, Gina. They’re still there, why?”

“You have to have them removed! It isn’t too late, they aren’t heavy yet, they haven’t spread. You…”

“Regina, I’m not having all of my teeth pulled!” She throws her hands up. “Just wait this out, the pain and heaviness will probably go away in a week or something.”

She tries for a bitter laugh but manages only a strained wheeze. “This isn’t the common cold, Emma. This is... I don’t know what this is.”

Emma’s hand comes to grips hers. A small comfort the cuts through the torment. But she knows what is coming. She isn’t hungry, she isn’t thirsty. But Emma is going to force it. She always holds her hand before inflicting well intentioned pain. 

Regina wishes that she wouldn’t. She can’t feed her all she wants, the nutrients don’t go to her… she is wasting away growing frailer and frailer while the sapphire chips grow heavier. 

Emma gives her hand a squeeze and gives her upturned, hollow cheek a kiss.

**.oOo.**

Her nails crack and fall away as the critters skuttle free.

Her hair hardens and breaks off.

They have used her body and now they need to leave it before it dies and takes them with it. 

She resents Emma for not having removed her eyes, especially now that the creatures are twitching and writing and preparing to do just that. It would have been abrupt and merciful had Emma done it. The parasites are going to do it slowly and tortuously. 

And Regina cries. She might as well, she is petrified. Petrified and alone. Emma hasn’t come to visit her and she knows in her soul that her fiance is probably bed bound too now. She has had the parasites for a few weeks, that is plenty of time for them to weigh her down by the teeth. 

It is just one more thing for her to feel guilty over; the parasites have probably jumped from her to Emma with a kiss or a shared drink. 

She squeezes her eyes shut as a white hot stinging flares up behind her eyes. It is a building of pressure that beats in her forehead. She feels them wriggling around and within the hour she feels warmth running down her cheeks. It is slow at first, slow and burning. She feels them crawling out, likely dragging bits and pieces of her eyes with them. They tickle and scathe as they scuttle down her cheeks. 

It feels like rock and jelly flowing down on a thin trail of blood.

Within another hour blue turns to black. 

Within another hour agony turns to insanity. 

She is screaming. Shrieking in pain and horror. 

**.oOo.**

Within a day she is found, reduced to a grotesque emaciated figure.

Within a day the blood and eye goo are wiped away.

Within a day she is brought to the hospital.

Within a week they have bandages wrapped around her head and covering her eye sockets. 

Within a week she finds that she can eat and benefit from having a meal. 

Within a week they speak with her about options. About learning to use braille and getting a guide animal. She doesn’t care for that, she just wants to know about Emma. She wants them to check on Emma. 

Within a week and two days they begin discussing transferring her to the psych ward. They are adamant about it when she insists that they pull Emma’s teeth. They tell her that the blue flecks were never there at all. That she has lost her mind and clawed her own eyes out. 

But Emma had seen them. 

Snow had seen them.

Everyone had been telling her how glamorous they looked…

Within a month she has been transferred.

Within a month they begin therapy both physical and emotional.

Within two months she has begun to recover physically. Her nails are beginning to grow back. Her hair is growing too. She isn’t particularly healthy but her bones no longer jut sharply beneath thin skin. 

Within three months she is visited less and less. Food is dropped off for her but they don’t speak with her for very long. At first she things that they are angry with her. Or that they are simply tired of caring for her. 

Within four months she is released from the ward with a very firm order to stay home unless she wants to end up in the hospital again. They promise to send someone to care for her. She can’t see but she doesn’t need to. 

She can hear the screams and cries.

Emma is not among the criers; as she drives she mentions that she has already done enough of that. That she had listened after all. That she has a brand new set of false teeth and is thankful that, that was all she had lost. 

She helps Regina out of the car and into the manor. She guides her to her loveseat and lets her lean against her. She rubs her arms and squeezes her close. It is the first pleasant sensation she has had in a long time. 

If not for the wails, it might have been peaceful. 

If not for her knowledge she might have been at ease. Might have been able to say that things were normalizing. 

She just hopes that they no longer see her as a suitable host.

Within four months, the parasites have spread. 


	2. A Useless Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Possessive Behavior  
> Fandom: W.i.t.c.h.  
> Summary: After it is taken from her, Nerissa finds a substitute for the Heart of Kandrakar

She misses it, that soft magenta pulse. For so long it has beat in rhythm with her own heart. It was a constant, a source of soothing. A source of strength and protection, that she hadn’t had before. She is aware and ashamed of who she was without it; she was the sort that was taken advantage of. The one that no one cared. The one that they shoved over and beat down. 

She didn’t particularly feel any sense of self worth. Not until the heart appeared in her hands. Its soft hum of power had saved her.

It has become a part of her. Just as much a part of her as her own heart. She knows it as well as she knows her own heart. 

And she craves it, craves it and needs it as she needs her own heart.

But they have taken it from her. It is hers and they have stolen it away. It leaves her with an unscratchable and nagging itch. With a cold sort of hollowness and a potent feeling of gaping venerability. 

They don’t understand what they have taken from her. 

They don’t understand how it drives her absolutely mad. 

She feels herself slipping, slipping back into weakness. Back into susceptibility. She rubs her hands over her face, fingers coming to rest at and dig into her hairline. She  _ needs  _ the heart back. She needs  _ her  _ heart back. 

It has been only three days since the Oracle has snatched it away. She has thought of little else in those three days. She still feels it in her soul, a faint residual hum of the heart’s unfathomable power and comfort. 

Nerissa still vividly envisions its glow on her chest where it had formerly hung on a silver chain.

She watches Cassidy with her wide, lopsided smile. Observes her practicing with her new powers. The yearning grows. The craving intensifies. And it is accompanied by a hatred that bubbles in her belly and as a pressure in her head. 

Cassidy is using it wrong. 

All wrong. 

She can’t--never will--wield it as she had…

Nerissa doesn’t sleep. 

She wants to sleep.

But she can’t. Not when something is missing. Something critical. She brings her fingers to her chest, clutching around a pendant that isn’t there. Her room is dark, the heart no longer casts its magenta rays upon the ceiling. 

Her head beats and pounds. 

Beats and pounds like a heart. 

She needs the heart. 

She needs a heart.

She has a heart. 

She needs to hold it.

It won’t be the same, but she needs to hold a heart again.

It is hard to break through the skin and harder still to crack a rib cage. She doesn’t feel. Nothing but rage and hatred...and a deep sense of unquenchable longing. She wonders if they will understand. She doesn’t think that they can. 

It only occurs to her after her chest cavity is open, that she doesn’t understand either. Blood gushes around her hands and the knife in it. For a moment her brows knit and she only stares. Stares down at the open flaps of her chest. Her heartbeat quickens. She can feel it. 

And she can see it. 

_ She can see it. _

It is a heart. 

It is her heart. 

But it is not  _ the  _ heart.

Her laughter is hysterical as the realization sets in. She supposes that it is just as well. The Heart of Kadrakar is as vital to the one she has left. They have killed her already, so she may as well finish the job. She would rather be with no heart at all, than left with only the useless, weak one. 

She raises the knife and finishes cutting it loose.


	3. Crying Raspberry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Candy/Fruit Gore  
> Fandom: Avatar The Last Airbender   
> Summary: As assassin attempts to kill a newly crowned Azula with an unidentified poison from the Foggy Swamp.

It has been several hours since they fixed the crown securely into her top knot. The transfer of power had been peaceful. She admits, with a degree of reluctance, to having shed a tear. Truth be told she hadn’t expected to reacquire her princess title, much less that of the Fire Lord. But after dragging her to various council meetings, Zuzu has decided that it would suit her. 

“You just…” He begins, his voice nearly lost under the lively bustle of the crowning ceremony afterparty. “You’re intimidating and well-spoken.”

Eloquence is her specialty, she agrees. She doesn’t say it, leaving him room to continue. 

“I tried the throne for a few days and…”

“You didn’t like it?” She fills in.

He nods. “I just think that I’d be better suited for something else. I liked traveling the world with Aang. I’m good at that and you’re good at this.” 

“You aren’t worried?” She asks as a waiter sits a few glasses before them. He wears an intricate, probably hand-carved wooden mask. All of the servers are masked but he is the only one of them who has chosen to wear wood over metal or plastic. 

“About what?” He asks. 

“That I’m going to snap. Lose it and set fire to the Fire Nation. That I’m going to ruthlessly…”

She feels a hand on the small of her back. “You aren’t father. I think that you want what is best for your people. I  _ trust  _ you.”

A kind warmth fills her belly and she tries to keep a smile from spreading across her face. She can’t let him know that she has gone soft, not even slightly so. “Good, you should. If you don’t trust me then you’ll fear me.” 

He rolls his eyes. “You don’t need fear. Believe it or not people still respect you.”

This time she can’t keep the smile from emerging. Can’t keep the relief from bleeding through. “I hope that you’re right. I…” she trails off. “I feel as though I won’t be taken seriously. I don’t think that there has been a Fire Lord so young.” So young, so feminine, so unhinged. But she isn’t unhinged, she reminds herself…

“They’re going to approve. As long as you treat them well, they’ll get used to you.” He gives her a warm smile. “They got used to me.” 

**.oOo.**

And, just as he had said, they warmed up to her. 

Most of them.

Protests didn’t fall on def ears, but she wasn’t giving up her crown. She tries to appease them and she has some success. But there are still plenty of people who’d like to see her dethroned and dishonored.

She knows it and accepts it. 

And yet it still comes as a surprise when someone finally has the courage to act upon their hatred. 

The third celebration commemorating the end of the war comes to a close and Azula doesn’t feel right. 

She feels queasy and heavy, despite having only a drink and a half and a small snack. There is a lingering sweetness on her tongue. The sugary taste of strawberry and peach. Maybe a mocking hint of cherry, a faint callback to her last tragically ending reign. 

And she knows, she just knows that it was the man in the wooden mask who has done this to her. He must have slipped something into her drink. Or he might have swapped their cups. The hows don’t matter. What matters is that the poison is churning in her stomach and possibly her veins. 

Her tread is awkward and off balance; a combination of a dizzy head and an aching stomach. She splays herself upon the bed and promptly folds in on herself. But this only makes her feel worse. With a shudder she unbunches herself and rolls onto her back. She doesn’t fancy sleeping on her back, but her stomach is too delicate for her to sleep in any other position. She holds her hands firmly against her tummy as though that will coax the feeling to pass. Even to the touch it feels taut and distended. This in itself, leaves her feeling doubly ill. 

Something is definitely wrong.

Undeniably wrong.

She tries to run through a list of poisons that might have this effect. But she can come up with none. None that her own. 

Azula’s stomach rumbles and turns and she clutches it harder still. She manages to heave herself upright, even that leaves her with a mild motion sickness. She carries on regardless of it, she was a fool to try to sleep it off. She should be in the infirmary. She finds herself unable to manage something as simple as making it to the door.

She doubles over, clutching her middle, feeling strangely bloated and nauseated. Somehow more than before. 

She takes one more step--a mistake--the liquid shifts unpleasantly in her belly. The sickly feeling intensifies until it is overwhelming. She hunches further over, it is more of a reflex than a conscious action. Still she tries to hold it back; the feeling of bile rising is probably one of the worst feelings, it is the sensation she dreads the most when afflicted with illness. 

Vomiting leaves her feeling dirty. Unsanitary and with a burning sensation in the back of her throat. And it is never just once, she usually ends up heaving twice, or thrice if her stomach flu is bad enough.

It steals her breath, comfort, and her dignity in one fell swoop.

She finds that she has made another mistake in repressing it. The queasy sensation doesn’t abate, it is however accompanied by a pressure now. An intense one that builds behind her eyes and in her nose. A congestion that leaves her head with a dull ache. And that dull ache swells into a rattling sensation, it feels like she is drowning from within. 

Her eyes water. Though water isn’t exactly what it feels like, the consistency of her tears feels thicker, stickier. 

With nerves and anxiety her stomach seems to turn itself over completely. Her grip on it tightens once more, her nails digging into her sides. She opens her mouth too late. The pressure releases itself. 

Fluid spurts from her nose, smelling strongly of peach and strawberry. It drenches the backs of her hands and pants, as sticky as the liquid leaking from her eyes. Her eyes burn so terribly. The pressure that builds behind her eyes has her fearing that they might burst out. If for no other reason than to expel the liquid and prevent such a thing, she cries. And when she does the fluid comes forth like raspberry jam. She thinks that it is raspberry jam, seeds and juice stain her cheeks and spatter on her collar as it spills from her eyes. She tries to wipe it away but only succeeds in smearing it and adding peach and strawberry to the mix. 

Her face is tingling, it still feels so full and swollen. She isn’t sure if it really is and she is too afraid to find out, not that she’d be able to make it to a mirror if she tried. She just knows that her head feels as though it will explode. 

There is a rumbling in her ears, like the sound of an ocean or a waterfall. She swears that the dreaded explosion is coming. Instead, her waterfall analogy becomes literal. Twin fountains of cherry pour from her ears, their small pits are grating on her ears as the juice pushes it forward.

Her face is leaking from almost every crevice and her stomach is still lurching over and over again. Azula opens her mouth to scream. She begins to, but finds herself choked off by another gooey juice. It is liquid at first, a combination of pineapple and kiwi with a dash of lime. Touched by hysteria and panic, she finds herself inwardly laughing about how delicious it tastes. Perhaps if she lives she’ll fix herself a glass of pineapple, kiwi, and lime juice. 

The liquid thickens into something more like molasses and seems to catch in her throat. She finds herself gagging, pushing against her stomach in an attempt to push it forward and out of her throat. 

Her eyes are still expelling raspberry jam, her ears are still bleeding cherry, and her nose is still gushing peach and strawberry. It is dripping down her chin along with pineapple juice and saliva. She is on her hands and knees but the ground is slick with juices and when she moves her hand, it slips. She is fully laying on the floor in the sticky mess that she is still adding to. 

Azula shudders, the raspberry jam feels like warm blood clots. She continues to choke and gag and finally the molasses in her throat comes up. It is a ball of pomegranate seed and honey. There may even be a few watermelon seeds in the mix. It certainly feels as though she has swallowed a watermelon and that it has taken root and grew to fruition in her tummy.

Regardless, she can breath again. She can breath and the pressure is growing less, though the flow of juices is still as heavy as a punch fountain. 

She lies on her side and lets the fluid run. She isn’t sure how long it takes but the spill is beginning to slow into a trickle. She finds the strength to get back to her hands and knees and empty her stomach. She heaves until she can no longer feel the juices sloshing within it and until at least some of the heaviness abates.

Until her arms go shaky and weak.

Azula flops back down onto her side, breathing deeply and savoring every unobstructed breath. 

She remains on the floor in a pool of sickly sweet smelling vomit and bile. The last of it seeps between her parted lips. For a moment she thinks that she is going to die. But her breathing stabilizes and her tears are pouring out salty and watery again.

She lies there panting lightly as she tries to shake off the last of the nausea. The taste of pineapple and kiwi still lingers on her tongue and the scents of peach and strawberry refuse to leave her nose. 

**.oOo.**

Azula’s stomach is still tight and delicate when she wakes up a few hours later. Zuko is rubbing her hand, he pauses briefly when he notices that she is awake. She finds herself flushing; her hair is probably disheveled and her clothes and skin are probably a sticky, stained mess. She feels gross. “I need a bath, Zuzu.”

He rolls his eyes. “Your bath can wait. The doctors already cleaned you up pretty good.”

She touches her cheeks and her chin; there are still sticky spots but, mostly, Zuko is right. She realizes that she is in an infirmary gown. “What the hell was that?” She asks weakly.

Zuko shrugs. “They found it in Mai’s cup too.” He gestures to the bed next to her own. “It was meant for me, but Mai stole my glass…”

“I’ve never heard of a poison like that.” She replies quietly. She still feels as though there is a sticky gunk in the back of her throat. 

“They think that it comes from the Foggy Swamp by the spirit banyan.” 

Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, Azula knows that she doesn’t want to have so much as a sip of it ever again. Agni knows what would have happened if she actually finished her second glass. She clasps her hands over her belly, the swelling is lessening but a dull ache lingers. 

“Here.” He offers her a glass of water. 

She shakes her head, “not yet.” 

He puts it aside. “You should try to get some rest.” 

She nods in agreement. With any luck, she will wake feeling normal and refreshed. 


	4. Like Taffy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Psychedelic  
> Fandom: Once Upon A Time  
> Summary: Emma takes a strange pill and finds herself afflicted by strange hallucinations.  
> Note: I totally had fun with the candy/fruit gore prompt and decided to give it another go with Regina.

“Come on, just one, Regina.” Emma pesters

Regina looks at the two tiny capsules in her hand. They are magenta and glimmer in the candlelight. “Emma, I don’t even know what they do.”

“Well, let’s see here, they’re in your magical vault full of useful things. I’m willing to bet that they either enhance your magic or give you really cool super powers.”

“I’ve got enough power, Emma.”

“Said no evil queen ever.”

Regina rolls her eyes.

“Here, I’ll go first.” Emma offers. She doesn’t wait for a reply before snatching them up and popping one into her mouth.

“Emma!” She shouts, despite knowing that the damage is good and done.

“Hey, if things go bad...” she shrugs. “At least we have the tools around us to fix it, right?”

Regina’s tummy flutters. “Given that I can figure out what’s wrong, yes.” She is beginning to wish that she hadn’t invited Emma along to help her clean her vault up.

“Where do you want this?” She holds up a dusty old spellbook.

“Oh now you want to clean?” She huffs.

“Cleaning is a lot more exciting when you throw magical pills into the mix.”

“And it goes by faster when you’re lucid and can focus.”

“Seriously, just try one! They taste like gummy bears, the green ones.”

And here she though that she couldn’t possibly be further dissuaded. She can always count on Swan to avert her expectations. “Gummy bears are horrid, Ms. Swan.” 

“You and your opinions are horrid.” 

She rolls her eye and swipes the spellbook from Emma. 

**.oOo.**

Regina looks strange; her hair is a bright magenta streaked with teal and highlighter yellow and her eyes glow purple and flecks of red.

Her skin glitters like that of a fairy, a light dusting of pastel pink and silver. She is absolutely celestial. Emma reaches out and touches her cheek. Regina rolls her eyes again, but a smile tugs at the corners of her lips. Emma drags her hand along her cheek, it is so pleasantly soft. The glitter upon it shifts and falls lightly dusting her hand.

Faintly, as though through a mouthful of feathers, Regina asks, “Emma what are you doing? Can you please fo...”

She is so gorgeous, breathtakingly so. Emma tries to listen to her words but her attention is on her wife’s lips. They look like black cherry or maybe raspberry. She wants to taste them. More than she usually does.

She leans in and slides her lips over Regina’s expecting that burst of cherry-raspberry. Instead she tastes like cranberry and cotton candy, though it is more akin to the flavoring used in jelly beans that it is to actual cranberry and cotton candy.

She begins to pull back and her brows furrow. Her lips are stuck. Her heart leaps and she gives her head another abrupt yank. Regina’s lips have the consistency of flytrap paper.

She jerks back again and Regina’s skin plus and tugs and pulls away, still clinging to her own lips like melted taffy as she continues her fight to free her face. Her hands are stuck too, cemented to Regina’s cheek. She decides that the woman’s face is more like bubble gum or tar than taffy. 

With all of her strength, Emma gives a mighty tug. Her hand comes free but she takes Regina’s cheek with it, revealing the white of her cheekbones, jaw, and teeth. She expects Regina to cry out in anguish or, at the very least, flinch. But she just stands there with a flap of glittery skin sagging like peeling wallpaper. It bobs and droops forward as Regina stoops down to pick up a...

Emma squints. It’s a candle. Maybe she can use melted candle wax to fix her face. 

Instead she sets it aside. Emma has half the mind to pick it up, light it up, and hover it over Regina’s face herself. It is as though the former queen doesn’t notice the blood leaking from her face. It runs down like honey. 

It smells like honey.

It is honey.

She’s bleeding...secreting honey.

“Regina you’re...” what is she going to tell her? That her skin is falling away? That it is sticky and sparkling? That she is a bloody, honey mess? “Gina you’re... why is your blood honey?” What if the bees come? Oh, lord, Emma hates bees. 

“Emma” Her brows crinkle. “What? What are you…?”

“Y-your face...”

Regina touches her fingers to it and more skin flakes off, bursting into flames as it drifts down to the floor. It lands up on the stones as a heap of chrysanthemum petals and real, coppery, blood. “What about it?” She asks. Emma’s eyes are fixed on the sizzling blood and petals. The wriggle about and morph into maggots that wriggle off and into the cracks in the ground.

She finds Regina’s face once more. It is as though her touch had been poison. It makes sense given her history. The scent she gives off abruptly turns to apple and pumpkin spice as the veins of her face bulge and spread in purple-magenta spiderwebs.

Regina sighs, a burst of cinnamon powder wafts into the air with it. Several hands reach from the cloud and grab at Emma’s hair. The purple-magenta reaches Regina’s eye and it comes free from the socket. Rolling down her face leaving a sticky trail of pink goo.

Emma jolts back with a small cry and rams into a shelf. Something falls on her head. There is a burst of warmth and she brings her hand to the spot. She already feels a swelling. When she brings her hands away, they come back sticky with pineapple juice. She is bleeding pineapple juice! She shudders. And shedders again when she sees the smoke wafting up from her fingers. It is burning! Her pineapple blood is burning through her fingers like an acid.

A sickly bile rises in her throat. She feels lumps within it like gumballs and jawbreakers all packed and crammed into it. Stars burst and pop in her vision. Her head is spurting pineapple juice like an erupting volcano. 

“Regina, I’m dying.”

“And you’re killing me.” She grumbles sardonically. Emma isn’t sure if she is humored or appalled that this is the final remark she will hear. 

**.oOo.**

Regina inhales deeply as she scoops Emma into her arms. It takes a small tinge of magical energy for her to be able to carry her back to the car. She pries open the door and buckles Emma in. 

The woman is out cold and she smells curiously of cupcakes and coconut. It isn’t an unpleasant smell by any means but it is bizarre. She pulls into her driveway and carries Emma to the bedroom. 

There is a pretty good gash on her head, but it is nothing that an icepack and some salve won’t fix. She spares a look at the remaining pill in her hand and thanks God that she didn’t take it. God forbid, both of them had been stumbling and thrashing about while grumbling nonsense. 

She finishes applying the salve and tucks Emma in with a note to herself to never ask the woman to clean anything magical ever again.


	5. The Marrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Bones  
> Fandom: Harry Potter  
> Summary: The best part of a meal are the bones. Bellatrix always saves them for last.

They crack.

They snap.

And if you have the right teeth, they crunch.

The best part of a meal is the bones; the texture is right and grinding them down and getting to the sweet savory marrow is always a satisfying endeavor.

Less satisfying is the transformation. Though pain is quite a pleasure, such a long duration of vulnerability is not. She usually disappears the day before the full moon with a strong awareness that they are aware that the transformation is a weak point. They know it because they know that she has no qualms about ripping a man to shreds. And if not to avoid doing such a thing, what other reason could she have for stealing herself away. 

The first tremors begin, a series of involuntary muscle spasms that grow into something much more jarring. Something that might be mistaken for a seizure if not for the elongating of her teeth and the contorting of her back. 

Before she is able to enjoy the cracks and snaps of other people’s bones she needs to endure the pops and breaks of her own. She doesn’t have control on a good night. And she has less of it now. She thrashes onto her side as her spine bulges. There is a tearing sensation, the product of bones and muscles growing faster than skin stretches. Her head snaps abruptly to the right as a searing pain erupts in her jaw, working its way to her ears and then to her head. 

With it comes a curious euphoria, a sort of adrenaline high. She manages a raspy laugh that is cuts off into a soft whimper when fangs fully erupt from her gums. With them comes an uncontrolled drool of blood. She spits it to the forest floor where it spatters on her hands. Hands that are caught somewhere in between human and wolf. 

Mercy is in short supply, not that she asks for it, the bones and tissues of her mouth and nose stretch with a sickly crunch. She yearns to get to the good part, the part where…

Her skin splits again, in several places to make room for tufts of wolf fur. Skin sloughs away and blood weeps from the place where fur has newly emerged. 

Her hands flex and she claws at the grass as the final throes of transformation die away. The torment turns to pure excitement. A frenzied joy accented by an enhanced bloodlust. Her bones make their final pops into place and she rises to her full, taller, height. Her head falls back and for a moment she drinks in the moon. It beams down upon her and the hunt begins. 

And tonight she will be tearing through Fenrir Greyback. It is nothing against the man, in fact she is nothing but gracious of him for turning her into the monster she was always meant to be. But she needs his pack and she needs him out of the way. This will be her territory and the pack will bring victims to her and set them at her feet. 

She offers the night a sharp howl. 

A war cry. 

A call to fight. 

The humans won’t have to worry, not this month, for the wolves will assemble in the clearing watching and waiting. Watching and waiting to bow to their new leader, unbeknownst to them.

**.oOo.**

Bellatrix pants and they seem to close in on her. He is stronger than she has anticipated. Where she can best him with a wand he has size and bulk on her. Her head cracks against the ground again. Her side throbs with a white hot intensity. Deep gashes along her ribcage freely gush blood. 

All she needs is one good slash. One that will open his belly and rain his innards upon her so that she can consume them before his very eyes. He pounces again and makes a snap at her neck. She doges and he tears a chunk from her shoulder. 

He has her pinned but she can wrench herself free if she is willing to make a sacrifice. By all means, she is. She has surprise on her side. Fenrir doesn’t expect her to jerk so forcefully out of his grasp. Her shoulder tears from its socket, bones screaming. It doesn’t deter her, if anything it fuels her. Sweet, savory pain. Her sudden jerk has thrown him back. She springs up and delivers her fatal slash. Her claw severs him cleanly down the middle and she is met with a satisfying rain of hot blood. It drenches her completely. Every inch of her fur is soaked through and through. 

Bellatrix thinks to lick it clean but there is more delicacy in yanking an organ and chewing that. Instead she digs into his chest and holds out his heart. She holds it up for the rest of the pack before tearing into it. 

She knows that they are aware of whose forest they are in. 

She picks their former leader apart before them and chucks them bits and pieces. She doesn't want them. She just wants to get to the bone. 

She flips him over and tugs at his spine, popping a few disks free. She pushes them around in her hand before picking one to chew. She doesn’t think that it should matter, but the small ones taste the best. They have the most intense flavor. 

The moon is beginning to wane so she will have to wrap things up. She will have her pack drag the rest of the bones into her lair. Normally she’d just leave the mess and simply create another cadaver to harvest. But she wants to savor this one. To suck the last drop of marrow and inhale every bit of bone powder. 

And she will when the moon rises again. 

She returns to the Malfoy manor stark naked and dripping blood. Much more of it than usual. She feels weak and lethargic but an undertone of exhilaration keeps her moving. She flashes the Dark Lord a smile. 

“Bella, clean yourself up.” Is all that he mutters. 

She nods. 

“Immediately, Bella.” 

She nods again. 

The thrill is over. For now she will be his faithful and submissive servant. She supposes that is her nature. But it is not the nature of the wolf. “Of course, my lord.”


	6. The Dragon Dies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Insanity  
> Fandom: Avatar  
> Summary: Fueled by delusions and a drive to prove that she’d be a more suitable firelord, Azula tests to see just how much heat she can withstand. Everyone knows that dragons can’t burn.  
> Warnings: Self-Harm & Suicide

It starts with hot wax.

It is nothing to trouble over, nothing at all. 

And that is probably why they don’t trouble over it. 

They see that it pacifies her, that it apparently soothes her and so they let her dribble hot wax onto the backs of her hands. They don’t grow concerned until they find her basking in a bathtub full of it. She comes out with something akin to a sunburn. But it is fine, she is a firebender, the rightful firelord, and by Agni she knows that she has dragon blood running through her veins. Her skin will peel away and it will mend itself stronger. 

She shouldn’t have to go so far to show everyone that it is she who should be sitting on the throne but this is what it takes and so she will do it. And when her father comes to have his freedom he will be proud. 

She fills the tub with wax again, but this time she leaves the cables lit. It is hotter than the first time, but it isn’t scalding. She will work herself up to that. She is a dragon but she knows her limits. She knows that her body doesn’t know that it holds a dragon, a fire goddess even. But, at the very least, her subjects will know that it is she who should wear the crown.

Azula tries to lean back and relax, but the intensity of the heat is a little more than discomforting. 

She had remained with in the tub for ten minutes last time--she was going for fifteen and would have made it there had they not plucked her from the wax and tossed her into a room full of doctors and therapists. 

She doesn’t need them. 

She doesn’t need any of that. 

And they will know that she doesn’t when she finally sheds her skin and shows her scales. When it is she who takes her position on the fire lord’s throne. When it is she who…

The door opens and she cringes. She has only just reached the ten minute mark and she  _ will _ , one way or another, make it to fifteen. She lifts her hands from the water and smears some of the wax upon her cheeks, chin, and forehead. 

She avoids her eyes, even a seasoned dragon knows better than that. And only a foolish dragon would blind itself with its own fire. 

The serving girl dips her hand into the wax and flinches back. “Azu...princess! This is too hot.”

“Perhaps for you.” She replies. “I’m perfectly content.” 

The serving girl rubs the wax from her face. “You’re burning yourself.” 

Azula rolls her eyes. “A minor inconvenience. If you stop meddling, I will grow immune…”

“Or you’ll get yourself killed.” Comes another voice. A loathsome voice. The doctor steps into the room. “Fetch the princess her clothes. And for Agni’s sake, someone drain this tub!” 

Of course this is code for, yank her out of it by any necessary means. Usually those means are chi blocking or darts laced with sedatives. She doesn’t fight it, there is no point really; by the time they have her out of the wax, her goal of fifteen minutes will have passed. 

By the time they reach the door she is rising from the tub herself and taking herself back to her room to peel off the hardened wax.

Her skin is a light shade of red when all of it comes away. 

She repeats this ritual every other night, letting her skin grow just hot enough for it to fade away the next day. And when her skin grows used to that abuse she pushes it further, heating the wax until light blisters rise upon her skin. 

She is careful to conceal them lest they cart her back to that loathsome institution again. They are painful, very much so but she treats them herself. So long as she holds up and holds strong those blisters will turn to scales. 

When she feels confident in her desensitization she moves onto the next step, a deeper heat. She holds her hand to the wick of a candle and lets the flame lick and lap at it. She lets it singe and blacken her skin. 

Admittedly, shamefully she cries. It hurts white hot and searingly. But a true fire lord can withstand the heat. Her father wouldn’t cry. He’d let the flames climb all the way up and he wouldn’t even flinch. 

Soon she won’t flinch either. 

Soon they will see.

They will see that she is stronger than Zuko. That she can withstand more than Zuko. That she is more in tune with the fire than Zuko. 

Within the month the entirety of her arm is scarred and scaly. Zuko and her doctors insist that she only has an arm because of Katara and her team of waterbenders. Azula knows that he just wants to deter her from proving her worth and seizing the crown. 

Within the month she is back in the institution, seething and scalding and cut off from her bending. Her fire.

They took  _ her  _ fire. 

They have reaped fire from a fire lord. 

From a dragon! 

Many months to follow she can’t quite recall. She thinks that she has been forcibly subdued for much of it. Subdued until she remembers to fake it. To bring her mask back up and grow quiet and stoic. It isn’t all too difficult. Meekness will serve her well in the long run. 

If she can hold out long enough then she will be able to go through with her plan. She will, once and for all prove that she is worthy of the throne. That she is not insane.

A smile splays across her lips.

It is the same one that she wears as she stands on the rim, her hair blowing about in the breeze. 

“Azula, please!” He calls. 

Begging won’t keep her from taking what is hers. 

“You don’t have to do this.” He continues. 

She can only roll her eyes. Because she does. She does have to do this. They won’t see the legitimacy of her reign--they won’t even acknowledge her right to it if she doesn’t. 

And all it will take is a simple jump.

A simple jump and she will rise again. And upon rising they will hand not only her bending back to her, but the crown and heaps of respect. “You’ll see, Zuzu!” She calls. She almost tells them that they all will, but she thinks that doing so would be overly dramatic and dully typical. “I’ll have my fire back. I’ll prove to you and father...and to everyone that  _ I am _ worthy of the crown.”

Something flickers across his face. It might be concern or it might be pity. She doesn’t care for it either way, it will be short lived when she climbs back up dripping lava and glory. That pity will turn to respect and appreciation. 

“I’ll see you soon, Zuzu.” She gives a little wave and leans back. 

It only occurs to her that she has made a mistake when the lava catches her and eats her away. It is merciless, offering her a moment of lucidity and clarity and time to cry out in anguish and regret. 

And then the dragon dies. 


	7. At Fourteen Hundred

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Infirmary 
> 
> Fandom: Once Upon A Time
> 
> Summary: Regina wakes up in a hospital to find it vacant and teeming with the undead. The cliche might be amusing if she weren’t stumbling around, still not recovered from what had landed her in the infirmary in the first place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was totally gonna skip this one but then I had an idea.

The infirmary is dark, the lights flicker, humming with a burst of electricity that is on its last sparks. The only thing that would make it more typical would be a pounding headache and a sense of confusion. But she knows where she is and what happened and it doesn’t take much to deduce that the world has ended. 

She supposes that she could fill her mind with denial. Pretty excuses like, ‘perhaps there was a terrible natural disaster and they had to vacate quickly’ or that, ‘they just forgot to pay the power bills.’ 

But even a fool could tell that the place was abandoned in a hurry and that much time has passed. Neglecting to pay bills doesn’t account for the thin coat of dust on the bedside table nor the overturned tables and chairs. 

It doesn’t account for the blood smears.

And it certainly doesn’t explain away the body laying on the floor amid broken glass and bullet casings.

Regina drags herself out of bed. Sure, her head doesn’t ache or pound, but it doesn’t feel exactly right either. The sensation isn’t particularly unpleasant nor uncomfortable. It is only a light pressure, a feeling of fullness accompanied by a light tickle. A small itch that doesn’t particularly bother her. 

She must admit that it is a bit disorienting, not so much that she can’t remember the layout of a hospital she has visited many times. But enough for her to feel sluggish and out of sorts. 

Of course this isn’t new. She had been transferred to the hospital for a fever one that had put her into a coma. It wasn’t anything new, she’d known that she was sick for some time and has been in and out of the infirmary for random collapses. The first had been at a town meeting, the second while getting ready for bed, and the third while at Granny’s with Emma and Henry. The duration of her blackouts has been ever increasing, this one has been the longest. 

They were in the middle of testing her for narcolepsy, though she didn’t think that the shoe fit. No less, that was the last diagnosis that they were investigating. She ponders other possible causes for herself as she wanders down the hall. 

It only occurs to her when she reaches a particularly dark hallway, that there might be something else wrong with her. Something psychological. She has just concluded with herself that the world has ended. And yet she is not concerned. 

She might be faintly amused by the cliche of stumbling around in the rotting husk of an infirmary were it not for the burning sensation that is flaring up on her hands and feet. 

It isn’t that she has lost emotion, more so that her emotions have been muted. Muted to the point that a sudden slam doesn’t jar her. There is a small twitch in her mind, a shot of surprise, but she doesn’t jerk nor jolt nor scream. Neither does her heart begin to beat faster. 

There was a noise. It had come from her left. That is all there is to it. 

Regina simply walks in the other direction, curiosity has just as much weight as surprise. She is looking for a computer, one that still functions or perhaps a drawer where her file is stored. She supposes that she is curious about that at least. What had they managed to diagnose her with before befalling whatever fate the rest of the world had succumbed to. 

Behind locked doors are ugly mutilated faces. Decaying, rotting ones. They beat on the wood and smoosh their faces against the windows. She is dully disgusted at the spittle and blood they leave upon said windows. She would hate to have to scrub their grimy fingerprints away. 

She steps around overturned medical carts and over severed limbs. Albeit she almost loses balance. It is probably good that they have traded her dress clothing for a hospital gown, on top of impracticality, she would hate to get her pricier attire dirty. 

She is dimly aware that this is another strange thought to have. 

She is also glad that they have switched her heels out for…

_ Oh… _

She stops for just a moment; her bare feet are bloodied and torn. Her brows furrow slightly. She wonders how she hadn’t noticed; God knows how much glass she has stepped on. She bends to pick shards out of her feet, but her attention is captured. 

Another twinge of emotion shoots through her, this wave is a bit more powerful. The creature lumbers towards her. It grunts and groans incoherently. She thinks that she should feel a sense of panic, she doesn’t have any means of defense and her feet are in no shape to run. 

She braces herself for teeth tearing into her neck, but the brutish beast stumbles into and over her. It slams to the floor groaning stupidly and gawking at her as though she is the one at fault. Regina opts to forget about her feet for the moment and hustles away from the zombie. 

She only thinks to be more cautious when she steps out into a hallway teeming with the creatures. She holds herself rigid and still. She hopes that the zombie falling upon her has left its decayed odor and a few blood smears on her. 

She knows that it had when the rest of them pay her no mind. So long as she keeps herself calm and unsuspecting she can make it through the hoard. 

She makes a mental note to check herself into a mental health clinic if she manages to find a corner of the world left undestroyed. She hadn’t realized that her depression was this mind-dulling and that her sense of self preservation has dropped  _ this  _ low.

A tickling sensation erupts on her cheek and she absently scratches it away, this is normal. She has had several rashes prior to her hospital visit. They would flare up and go away. 

Anyways, she ultimately decides as she reaches the computer, that it makes sense for her to feel so low. Henry, Emma, Snow, they’re all dead. There won’t really be any substance to her life with all of them probably shambling about among the undead. 

Regina turns the computer on and clicks around until she finds her file. She listens to the footfalls of the hoard as she waits for the file to load. She scratches her shoulder and brings her hand back to the mouse. It is slick with blood. Her lip curls, she probably should have wiped the mouse down before handling it. 

She scrolls through the file and reads;

_ Patient: Regina Mills _

_ Sex: Female  _

_ Date of Birth: February 1st... _

Regina scrolls past this, she knows all of this.

_ Mills was admitted to the hospital after spontaneously collapsing for a third time on January 15th 2015. Mills had been running a high fever (Note: body temperature was remarkably high at around 110). _

Another soft twinge of concern sparks in her head. She is certain that a fever that high can kill. But she had made it to the hospital. 

_ Mills’ woke up sporadically throughout the next several days. Level of brain functioning and alertness varied. The rashes on her skin began to spread and resist treatment. Mills complained of this before losing consciousness once more.  _

She doesn’t remember this. 

_ Mills woke up one final time before falling into the coma that she has been in since. Her behavior was erratic and aggressive. We suspect that this is related to pain and fever delirium. Cause of fever: still unidentified. Theory: this illness is the first of its kind. A mutated strain perhaps.  _

The hospital seems somehow colder and more oppressive. She is beginning to feel again, she is both thankful for the emotions roused and horrified. She tries to push them back again. As she clicks to the next page. 

_ Patient: Regina Mills _

_ Date Of Death: January 19th 2015 _

_ On the nineteenth of January, Mills’ fever reached 112 degrees. Mills did not wake from her coma. At approximately 11:45 AM, Mills’ went into cardiac arrest. At approximately 11:57 AM Mills’ brain activity ceased. Time of death is recorded to be precisely 12:00 at noon.  _

And yet the file continues. Just one more full sentence.

Regina stares at the screen until it goes dark. She isn’t dead. She holds her hand up and flexes it just to be sure. It moves. It moves but it bleeds. She gets to her feet, her legs still work. Sure, she is somewhat sluggish, but she isn’t staggering. She isn’t shambling.

She has rational, higher thinking capabilities. She is using them now. She uses them to repeat what she has just read; 

_ At fourteen hundred hours, brain activity from the deceased was detected by a monitor that had been left plugged in by [name redacted].  _

_ Conclusion: faulty equipment.  _

_ Note: Replace ASAP.  _


	8. Woodskin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Body Horror  
> Fandom: Avatar the Last Airbender  
> Summary: In trying to burn the Foggy Swamp banyan, Azula angers the spirits. The punish her by entrapping her within a tree.

Azula doesn’t think that she deserves this. She confesses to herself that, perhaps, some comeuppance is overdue. But this? This is inhumane. Perhaps it is so because they no longer see her as human. Maybe they never have. Maybe no one ever has. She is a monster on the inside and they are making her one on the outside. 

She knows her fate before they hand it to her. They lead her through a whole forest of them. She observes their faces twisted into grotesque and tortured grimaces. They can still move their faces but their conditions leave their expressions perpetually horrified.

She can’t remember the last time she has cried so hard. She doesn’t think that she has ever been this shaky--trembling to the point she can’t even stand, let alone walk. They have to drag her along, through the mud and silt with rocks tearing lines in her bare knees. She has never once begged. Not for mercy, not for anything.   
She makes an exception for this. Pleading for another chance. 

They insist that she has already been offered several and that the window is closed. 

Rational gives way to emotion, desperate emotion. Her words become less coherent and jumble into screams. No one can hear them, she is in the Spirit World now. Those who do hear her, revel in her terror.   
Really they can do anything they please to her.

They lead her past a final tree and she manages to ask if they’ll ever let her free. She isn’t sure that her words were decipherable so she draws in a deep breath and says what she believes is the last sensible thing that she ever will. “You’ll let me out eventually right? I-I’ll have another chance eventually.” She swallows hard, she already knows the answer. 

“There is a chance, sure.” Says the spirit holding her. Its grip his stronger than anything she has felt before. This is despite it being unnaturally slender.

A creature that could be a primate if not for the twin faces on its palms. “But I have yet to see it work out for any one.” Speaks the face on the right hand. It’s voice is gruff but feminine. “They are too stuck in their ways.” Sighs a smoother masculine voice from the left hand.

“How?” She manages. She can’t coherently elaborate. 

“Acceptance of atonement. Genuine sorrow.” Replies a third spirit. She has been quiet until then. She is a true spirit of the swamp with woodsy limbs and hair like banyan vines. “No one ever makes it past feeling sorry for themselves. They…” she gestures to the other imprisoned. “Think of themselves. Only of how they long for and deserve freedom. The tree knows when remorse is genuine. They know when to release.”

Azula wonders if the trees sense dread and feel sympathy. She wonders if they’d spare someone who has never shown it for herself. Her heart hammers. She resigns herself to what is going to happen and she shuts down.   
It is easier to shut down and let herself go vacant.   
To feel nothing at all.   
She thanks her father for beating that ability into her. 

Even still she can’t block out sheer horror when she stands before the tree. It is an ugly thing, dead and withered, and overrun by mosses and fungi. Some of the familiar variety and some of the spirit. It looms over her with its sinister blackened bark.

She is unable to suppress another sharp and gasping sob.   
They turn her back to the tree and slam her into it. She expects the bark to simply close around and encase her. Or to pull her into it and consume her. Instead they turn her back around and rip a clean vertical cut along her spine. 

The screech that tears from her throat is less human and more feral. It only grows more so when they peel back the flaps of her skin and hug them around the tree. Now it begins to consume her. Though consume is the wrong descriptor. It isn’t eating her nor pulling her into it. It is fusing to her, melding itself to her skin and making the two of them one single organic entity. 

It is a fusion that doesn’t end with just the body; her head aches as the tree pumps its memories into it. Ages of pain in the physical world. Days where it had been struck by lightning, when it had been cut, and eventually when it had died. The day that human ambition sapped it of clean and nutritious water. 

She can feel her own body dehydrating and shriveling. All the while it pumps sap into her veins. Sticky and thick, it clots her blood until it overruns it. Her veins feel congested, her heart sluggish and heavy. Her head dips. Only for a moment. The moment before her hair becomes tangled in the bark and, by it, her head is yanked back. She can’t feel her arms up to the elbow nor her legs up to the knee. She can’t see them either, they have fused more or less completely to the tree. Exactly at her elbows and knees is where skin turns to bark. 

Her breathing is heavy and panicked. Eyes frantic and tearstained. The tribe of spirits look at her with either indifference or conquest and satisfaction. She thinks that she may detect the faintest hint of pity on the face of the monkey’s left hand.

“D-don’t leave me here.” She manages to whisper. With the opening of her mouth comes a drool of sap. She can’t wipe it away. They don’t wipe it away for her. And they do leave her there. 

They leave her there for a very long time.  
She loses track of just how long, but she is sure that it is years.   
It is certainly long enough for the fugi to grow.

The first two weeks were the the hardest. Those were the days when she’d still clung to the hope that they would change their minds or that they would come back and see how miserably she has grown and set her free. But they haven’t come back at all. She doesn’t think that they think about her anymore. 

She had also yet to desensitize to her situation. Nourishing is the worst, she hates it probably more than any other aspect. When the tree forces a vine into her mouth and feeds her. It first gives her drink, a bitter juice that tastes like mud and worm and then comes the gunk. The horrible sludge that keeps her alive. It has a texture that excites her gag reflex, one that she can feel running down her throat like a thick mucus and tastes not only of worm and dirty swamp water but of death and decay as well. The tree doesn’t really have any regard for her limits and usually leaves her heavily overfed and with excess sludge dripping down her chin and an aching stomach. She thinks that it does this because feeding happens only once a month. It is as practical as it is cruel. A moment of discomfort to sustain her for many more of them. 

She has grown used to it though and it doesn’t bother her the way that it used to. Her eyes sometimes water at the horrid taste and the scent lingers in her nostrils. On the worst occasions her gag reflex is stronger than anticipated. On better months the tree is careless and nearly drowns her. Though the aftermath is cruel as the hope of release is reaped from her. 

She tries to distract herself through reflection. The kind of introspection that offers her a chance at freedom. But she finds that it is hard to detach from her real goal and feel truly sorry. More than anything she is still scared. And that fear makes it hard for any real reflection. 

Her days are mostly monotonous now that she has grown used to the pain. To the feeling of the tree’s abrasive bark rubbing against the flaps of her skin. Now that she has come to expect the tree to creep and burrow further into her every now and again; she feels the bark pricking against the walls of her sides and the vines coiling around her ribs. Sometimes she sees the vines moving about and bulging under her skin. Yet she is still alive, it keeps her alive. It knows better than to puncture the organs.   
Unless of course said organs begin to fail. It intervenes then, subtiting her body’s natural tissues with its own. This doesn’t happen often though. 

Even still, she feels more like a plant or an organism than a human being.

It is when the fungi and mosses grow on her face that it becomes hard for her to remember that she was ever human at all. The growths are the first things she has felt in a long while. A break to the months passed in uniformity. 

They are a new kind of pain.  
An unfamiliar one.   
For the first time, she cries again. 

The first colony of mushrooms sprouted on her shoulders. She’d first seen them as raised lumps. She hadn’t been sure what to make of them. Only that they throbbed and that the throbbing was terribly painful, and yet she had no free hands to cradle them with. And then the holes appeared in her skin, leaking a gentle flow of blood and pus.   
Within the day, the mushrooms burst up out of the holes, free then she’d ever be. 

That was the first time she’d cried in a long time. 

Now, the fungi clings to her like barnacles to a ship. Alongside moss that hangs like seaweed. The moss isn’t like the mushrooms. The moss is external and simply drapes itself over her as it does anything in its way. It lays over her eyes like a soft gauze and she can no longer see, everything is a shade of green.   
It rests over her mouth so thicky that she cannot open it anymore. 

This is when she decides that she isn’t human anymore. She forgets what that means, much less that she was supposed to be feeling remorseful about something.   
Weeks pass and the droning toneless feeling as back. She is used to a new outbreak of mushrooms every now and again and finds herself thankful to see the feeding vine. Not only does it tell her that another month has gone by, but it clears the moss from her mouth.

Horror doesn’t return to her for at least a year. The trees around her are falling one by one. Bodies are halved and broken but they don’t bleed. Not red anyways. She can fully confirm that she is growing less and less human, seeing these former people ooze sap in stead of blood. Reandered stupid and emotionless by years of the same situation, their unbridled fear is much starker now that it has returned to them. Voices cry out in anguish. They are still alive. Alive and in pain for the first time in years. 

There aren’t many trees left before hers.

.oOo.

There is a chill running up and down Jet’s spine. There is something about this section of the swamp, something in the air of it that is oppressive and undeniably tortured. His team tells him that he is being superstitious and ridiculous and that they have a job to do so he better start swinging his axe. 

He decides that it is probably because he had died. He had died and come back and has been left with a residual connection to the spirit world. He doesn’t know what he is dealing with, but each time he buries his axe into the bark he feels an overpowering guilt. 

He comes up to his next tree, this one looks fairly young. He attributes this to his doubled apprehension. 

“Go on boy. Chop!” Shouts a gruff voice. 

He takes a deep breath and slams the axe into it. His stomach heaves; he has never seen a tree bleed before. He presses his lips together and takes another swing, they’ll think him mad. He thinks that he is mad, that the swamp is getting to him; he has heard rumors of it inducing strange hallucinations. 

With his third swing, the blood is spurting furiously and Ghan is telling him to stop. 

“What the fuck?” The burly man asks with a whistle. “In Agni’s name, I have never seen such a thing.” 

“What are you talking about?” For his question, Jet receives a thump on the head. 

“Don’t pretend like you ain’t see it.” Says one of his coworkers. “This fuckin’ tree is bleeding.” 

Jet drops his axe and seizes the opportunity. “I told you that there was something wrong with this swamp. Can we get out of here?”

.oOo.

Blood runs down her mouth and her eyes grow glossy. It is unbearable and there is no release. Her innards have been severed in several places and her belly is open and weeping. Just like all of the others she is alive. 

She can feel the tree working to knit her back together. It starts with her most vital organs. Working in and out of her. The vines bulge beneath her skin with more furry and wriggling than ever. 

A week in and she loses track of what is going on inside of her entirely. Feeding is different too now that her stomach is in shambles. There is a vine buried deep in her neck and one fixed to her chest, ceaselessly pumping nutrients throughout her ravaged body. 

She wants to go home. But she doesn’t remember where that is.   
She wants to feel loved and safe. But there is no one to love her nor protect her.   
She wants it to end. She wishes that she could yank the vines out of her. 

She remembers a face. It is not her own. But it is like her own. And she remembers that she used to put fear and sorrow onto that face. Her heart pangs but she can’t quite piece together why. She doesn’t have a name for what she is feeling, but she likes it as little as everything else she feels. 

She thinks that she wants to see that face again, but in person. Even if that face belongs to someone that she doesn’t particularly care for. She isn’t choosey about company anymore and maybe this craving is the last thread of humanity within her. 

Maybe if she severs it she won’t be human.  
And if she isn’t human then maybe she won’t feel pain anymore. 

But the face won’t go away. It appears in her dreams when she manages to sleep. It doesn’t leave her waking mind either. She doesn’t remember much but she remembers that she is a bad person and she supposes that no one should really feel bad for her. That she should stop feeling sorry for herself because she has earned her place here. 

Her stomach is mostly mended and the tree is finally able to spare some bark and tissue for linking her calf back to the rest of her leg. She is so broken and in so many ways. She is able to cry again.

She is soon fully mended and the days return to their uneventfulness. It is the same old pain and the same helplessness. It is sometimes punctuated by a warmth, something that might be comfort. She can feel it more fully when she clings to that face and the idea of seeing it again. 

She sees another pair instead. They are the first face she has seen in a while and she only dimly recognizes them. It is a spirit. They speak but she can’t remember how to decipher the language. They look mournful, the left face more than the right. 

She tries to say something but her mouth feels as though it is swollen and stuffed with sludge. Mayhaps it is. The faces leave her. She is alone again and cries for another false hope. The next morning two more figures join the first. There is a spirit that looks like a tree. This one speaks to her again, but she doesn’t understand, and it puts fingers to her forehead. 

Her vision begins to blacken and she smiles.   
It is finally over.   
She can finally die and have peace.

.oOo.

When she awakens it is in the hollow husk of a dead tree. She is shivering and naked, pale and gaunt. Coated in grime and a host to various forms of plantlife. She draws her knees up to her chest, unsure of what else to do. 

She feels nauseated and confused. She is hungry and thirsty and terribly cold. She swallows a lump in her throat and tries to muster up the will power to rise and figure out where she is. But her brain has met its limit, she makes it only into a sitting positions and finds herself slumping over the rim of the tree. 

Her head sags and her arms go limp.   
She can’t remember how she got there.   
She can’t remember who she is. 

But she remembers that face. That scarred face. 

The next face that she sees is somewhat similar to that one. They have almost the same hair cut but he is more scraggly and his eyes are darker. He mutters something that she can’t make out through the fog in her head and then he hoists her over his shoulder.   
She doesn’t fight him.  
She is too tired anyways. 

This time her awakening is a little more pleasant. The man has her hand in his and she is laying upon something soft. It isn’t a bed, but it isn’t the ground. It takes her a moment to deduce that it is a sleeping bag and it is cozy. Cozy and warm. 

“Here.” He offers when she sits up. He hands her a bowl, cups her hands around it. It is also warm. She realizes that she is rather parched and that her stomach is lightly rumbling. She stares at the contents in the bowl skeptically. It looks too much like that goop. 

“It tastes better than it looks, I promise.” The man flashes a smile and takes a spoonful from her bowl. She is still reluctant, but doesn’t decline when he brings the spoon to her lips. “I’m Jet.” He gives her another spoonful. “Who are you?”

She swallows. “I--I don’t remember.” Her voice sounds strange to her. She hasn’t used it in so long. It occurs to her to be relieved that she remembers how to speak and to understand things that are spoken to her. She thinks that she had forgotten for some time. 

“Yeah, you were out there for a long time.” He cuts through her thoughts. “I think that I might know who you are.”

She tilts her head. 

“A few years ago, someone went missing in the swamp. Someone important.”

“Important?” 

Jet nods. “A princess.” 

The word rings some bells. 

“Fire Lord Zuko’s sister…”

The face comes back in her mind. She attaches the name to it. Things begin to fall into place. 

“I think that he’ll be happy to know that you’re…”

She slumps over once more as too many images bombard her at the same time. Her eyes roll back and she collapses into Jet. She leaves consciousness with a sensation of him rubbing her back. She expects to come to in the sleeping bag again. Instead she wakes up cradled in Jet’s arms. He is delicate with her and it is very much welcomed after years of brutal touches. 

Azula’s eyes sting with unshed tears. It is admittedly overwhelming to recall those nights spent tethered to and fused with that tree. She can’t entirely wrap her head around it. Can’t fully conceptualize that it had happened to her. That it had happened at all.   
She thinks that maybe she had been deep into the throes of insanity. 

And then Jet mutters, “I thought I was going crazy when I saw those trees. I know spirits can do weird things but I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

“How do you know?” 

“They keep finding body parts in the trees that we just cut down. You’re the only body that we found in once piece. And I think that Zuko will be glad to know it.” 

Azula stares at her hands and notices for the first time that they are scarred. Ugly, raised, and with the texture of bark. These scars run up to her elbows. She doesn’t need to look to know that her legs bare the same ones. 

“What did you do to make them so angry?”

“I tried to set the banyan on fire.”

“Like a banyan or thee banyan.”

She fixes him with a dull stare.

He rubs the back of his head.”Yeah, I guess that they won’t get that fussy over a regular one.” He interlocks his hands with hers, he doesn’t seem to mind the roughness. “How’d you get them to let you free?”

She shrugs. It isn’t that she doesn’t know. It is that she doesn’t really want to talk about this anymore. It is hard enough to admit to herself that she’d done a lot of things wrong. It will be harder still to admit it to Zuzu. She isn’t ready to tell Jet. 

She feels his thumb stroking the back of her ruined hand. She is surprised that he isn’t recoiling in disgust at the texture of it. Now that she has taken notice of the scars and said texture of them, it is going to drive her mad. It looks gross and it feels grosser. It leaves her feeling sick. 

The next day Azula conceals the scars with gloves and long sleeves. And she keeps them hidden for the longest time. Even with Jet insisting that it doesn’t bother him. And even, upon their reunion, with Zuko assuring her that he won’t judge her for them. He points to his own scar. But he doesn’t understand just how unsightly the raised and rough grooves of her skin are. Even if he could bare to look at them, he could never comprehend what they remind her of. How looking at that bark-like texture makes her feel inhuman all over again.

For the longest time, Azula can’t stomach it. It is more than just the memories that the scars beckon to the surface. It is the appearance of them alone. They remind her of disease and decay. They remind her of old age and death. And it is more bitter still when she brings them to her cheeks and feels smooth skin. Her arms and legs used to be like that. Now they are damaged. She is damaged. Branded by the spirits and by the trees.   
She considers taking a knife and skinning herself or burning the flesh away so that it may grow back in a more savory way. 

Jet always stops her. Eventually she takes to sitting with him and simply staring at her ruined limbs until she grows used to the sight. Just as she had gone numb to the tortures within the tree, she goes numb to this disgust that her arms instill within her. 

Things become significantly easier from there. She begins to make amends. Things with Zuko mended themselves; how could they not when he had been so supportive of she and her recovery both physically and mentally? 

It is no quick process and it spans another year or two. She relapses a few times. And on her worst nights. Nights when she is agitated or angry or spiteful. She thinks that the swamp is monitoring her. Mostly she is continuing making progress with her family and old friends. Mostly she is helping fix what she contributed to breaking. Mostly she is getting her life back together.   
Mostly it has improved. She feels happy. She feels...loved.   
She is starting to feel powerful and confident again. Like she is making something of herself and her life. 

But she can’t allow herself to bask in it for too long because the swamp gets anxious when she does. She thinks that it is waiting for her to mess up and sink back into her old ways. And that it will be ready when she does.  
She thinks that she can still feel a small vine from that tree wriggling around inside of her, waiting to take root and mutilate her body.

She grips Jet’s hand tighter and he gives her a smile before leaning in for the kiss that will make their marriage official. 

For now, the swamp is quiet and content.


	9. Red Rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Guts  
> Fandom: Legend Of Korra  
> Summary: Kuvira gets into a car accident and wakes up in the middle of the surgery.

They strap her down but they don’t put her out. She gathers that there isn’t any time for that, but it doesn’t make it any better. They tighten the straps. She isn’t sure that she will actually feel anything anyways. Rather, she isn’t sure that she will be able to distinguish new pain from the pain that she is already in. 

Kuvira supposes that the hows of it don’t really matter, but she is aware of them all the same. Really it is quite unremarkable. She’d always assumed that she’d get herself killed in action. That someone would pin her under a boulder or slit her throat in her sleep in an attempt to end her Empire. 

If not that then she had expected to meet her downfall at her own hands. The price of another impulsive and reckless endeavor. No matter how hard she tries. No matter how tightly she binds her hair and how rigidly she presents herself. She can’t shake the person beneath. The person that craves stimulation and adrenaline. 

By all means, she can see herself meeting her end while thrill seeking. Especially with Korra there to encourage her. The two of them are reckless and destructive and they feed off of one another. 

It was neither of these things that had taken her down. It was a satomobile accident of all things. A series of unfortunate mishaps all perfectly lined up to take her out. The vehicle in front of her breaked abruptly. She breaked in uniform, the satomobile behind her did not. It slammed into her own vehicle hard enough to throw her through the window. 

Jagged spikes of glass tore her to ribbons. The largest of them sliced her middle open. She had been dully awake. Awake enough to realize what had happened. Awake enough to know that her guts were tangled and clumped on the glass and strewn over the hood of the satomobile. But not awake enough to do anything about it. Nothing but stare up at the sky with glassy eyes. She coughed. It was a wet cough, forced out to clear blood from her throat. 

The last thing she truly remembers having done was feebly trying to hold her stomach closed despite the size of the wound. 

She has been in and out of wakefulness since. She thinks that they might not realize she has woken up again. They probably wouldn’t be working to stuff her innards back in place if they did. They mean to help her, to save her life but it is torturous feeling them rustle around as they try to work out what goes where. The waterbenders don’t help much, at least not with the pain. All of their focus goes into healing over comfort. 

No, they definitely haven’t realized that she is awake.

She guesses that it is alright, her mind will shut itself down again soon. It can only handle so much. Another hand reaches into her, this time with a few tools. Medical grade thread and needles to stitch her back together where the waterbenders’ healing doesn’t work. 

She feels herself growing mercifully dizzy again. 

The sound of gushing and slurping accompanies her on her way out, the sounds linger in her dreams. Dreadful dreams where she sees herself dragging her body from the wreckage, but no one is there to untangle her from the glass. She has to do it herself. She has to pick up her own innards and pull them off of the spikes. They beat and pulse, still working as they are supposed to, all the while spilling blood and viscera about the hood of the satomobile.

Red stains her gloves and her shirt. The air around her fills with voices telling her that she has earned this. Nevermind that she has repented, that she is actively trying to help rebuild the portions of Republic City that she has knocked down. 

They scream at her, telling her that it doesn’t matter, that she had sprayed this city with blood and gore and so she should become part of the mess. At this point it is obvious to her that she is dreaming, not that it wasn’t before. 

But now the sky opens up and guts rain down upon her. Not just guts but brains and hearts. Eyeballs and bone fragments. All of them appearing to have been blasted apart. The cover and coat her in a thick and heavy slosh. 

She has to move, has to get herself inside. She works with quicker hands to unravel her guts. But her entire body is slick with blood both her own and that which has come from the sky...is still coming from the sky. She slips and gives a sharp scream as she tears some part of her further. She falls back into the vehicle, head slamming against the seat. 

The rain continues to fall and the organs are beginning to stack atop the broken windshield. Kuvira lurches forward to punch them away. She doesn’t think that they should be too heavy. But they are, and each one that falls adds to the weight of them. She knows what is going to happen before it does. One innard sloshes through the hole in the windshield and lands in her lap. And then another and another. It looks like ketchup through a funnel but much chunkier. 

She is going to drown.

Drown in a bloody fucking mess. 

Raava knows that she has more than enough guts to replace her own now. They fall into the gaping wound with a vengeance as the voices turn to laughs, jeers, and taunts. She opens her mouth to scream, a mistake. She has never tasted human flesh nor guts before. 

She never wanted to. But she does. And they taste like copper. The texture is both mush and rubber. She heaves but the steady onslaught of gore keeps anything from rising. She suffocates as her world goes red. 

And then her world goes white. Everything is bright. To bright for her to see anything. She saints and squeezes her eyes shut with a pained moan. Her body feels weak and limp, numb. Her wrists throb and so does her abdomen. 

She bolts upright and presses her hands to her middle. Another hand comes to claps around her wrist, while two more of them gently push her back onto the mattress. “Careful, you’re going to hurt yourself again.” 

“Baatar?” She winces. 

“Yeah.” He replies. 

Some of the tension leaves her body and she tries to relax into the bed as her memories begin to work themselves back in place. The car accident, the surgery, the dream… “Am I…?”

“Alive?” She recognizes Korra’s voice.

“I was going to say, ‘okay’.” Kuvira replies. “But…” her voice falters before she can finish. 

“You will be.” Korra assures. “As long as you don’t spring out of bed again.”

Kuvira brings her hand back to her middle and holds it there only for a moment before Baatar moves it again. 

“And if you just leave it alone.” Korra rolls her eyes.

“We’re probably going to have to cuff her or something.” Bataar chuckles. “She’s always done that.” He pauses. “She doesn’t like to leave injuries alone. She’s picked at pretty much every scab that she’s ever had.” 

“I don’t need to be cuffed.” Kuvira rolls her eyes. “But a glass of water would be nice.” 

Korra fills one half way. 

“Slowly.” Baatar says. 

She nods and takes the cup in her hands. 

“You’re very pale.” Baatar notes. 

“Let me know what your complexion is like after being sliced open.” She puts the glass to the side and lays back down. He might need the cuffs after all because her hand absently makes its way back towards her wound. Granted, she catches herself and simply hovers it above the stitches. 

Her stomach aches and her heart throbs. But at least they are inside of her where they belong and, hopefully, in the right positions.


	10. Detox

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Poison   
> Fandom: Voltron   
> Summary: Acxa hadn’t meant to kill anyone. She doesn’t even know how it happened. But now they have her confined and they poke and they prod her.

Acxa tries to tell them to stay back. To stay away from her because every single one of them had withered and died. They have her lying on her back and cornered. She let them do it, they wouldn’t have been able if she hadn’t. She can tear them to ribbons with little effort if she pleases. But that isn’t what she wants. She just wants to live in peace, to observe them afar. To learn. To assimilate. 

Yet they treat the Galra differently. Others, the Puigans, Balmerans, the Krellians, all of them are mostly accepted. They fascinate the humans. In contrast, the Galra are largely feared. 

Being half-Galra is more than enough to elicit and garner the same fear. From that fear comes the hatred. And that hatred drives them to violence. They probably see themselves as heroes, as noble vigilantes when they kick her and punch her. 

She lets them do it and they do it because she lets them. 

She lets them because she is aware of her own strength. 

Aware that she can accidentally kill them if she lashes out. 

For it, she takes  _ another  _ beating. 

Her own people will mock her for it. It is fine, better to be known as weak then as a savage or a murder. Evidently, she finds herself with both reputations; a weak and savage murderer. To her people she is weak. To the people of Earth she is a killer. 

When she tells the group surrounding her to back off, when she pleads with them to stop, that take it as her begging for her own safety and not there. Perhaps she should tell them to throw objects at her instead of fists if they must throw something. From a distance, they’ll be fine. 

But the tallest and most muscular of the boys stomps right up and yanks her up by her collar. Her lip is already split and bleeding. She isn’t sure if it will be her nose that gets bloodied next or her eye that will be blackened. Rather, she isn’t sure were the attempt is intended. She knows that he will shrink back in horror before he can land either strike. 

He lets her go abruptly with an alarmed cry. His hand begins to purple. It always starts like that. Always at the hand. “Wh-what the fu-fuck did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.” She sputters. “I-I didn’t mean to do anything. It just happens.”

His whole arm goes stiff and his veins pulse with that strange magenta light. It reaches his neck and his lips blacken. His eyes follow. And then a purple sludge spills out of his mouth where it plops and glows at his feet. He falls to the floor racked by twitching spasms as his body breaks down. The poison flows through him like acid and eats him away like acid.

Flesh mixes with blood and purple until there is only a puddle and a pile of smoldering bones. The rest of his clique onlookers with shock and horror, with rage and hatred. One of them snarls and balls her fist. 

“I tried to tell him.” Acxa begins as they all close in around. “I tried to warn him.” The girl steps forward, closer than the rest of them. “I’m trying to warn you too. Don’t touch me.” 

The girl responds by beating on her, punch after punch until she goes purple . They are all kicking and punching now. All but one boy, the smallest of them, who screeches and flees. All around her are steaming purple puddles, slightly bubbling, and disintegrating bones. 

Beaten, bloodied, and horrified, Acxa lets her head drop and stares at the sky. 

It is the last that she might see of them. 

They take her away the next morning. 

She doesn’t blame them, the boy had gone for help and the scene that he leads them to looks terrible, as though she has taken some sort of sick vengeance. She thinks that the only indication otherwise is that she is crying and slowly rocking herself back and forth.

Keith and the other paladins try to vouch for her.

Hunk, caring and sympathetic as ever, reaches out to comfort her. She flinches away and practically screams at him to stay back. Only explaining herself when they are a safe distance from her.

She thinks that this is why she is in a lab and not in a prison cell or on her way to an execution.

People surround her. She doesn’t know any of them but they make her uncomfortable with their hazmat suits. They aren’t particularly cruel to her but they are weary. Whether they mean it or not, they are treating her like she is a dangerous criminal. They are only half right; she is dangerous but she isn’t a criminal. She hadn’t set out to hurt anyone. She doesn’t even know how or why it keeps happening. 

She wants to trace it back to her prolonged exposure to subtle quantities of quintessence while working with Lotor and Haggar. That the stuff as gotten inside of her and has rendered her toxic after failing to break her down and melt her away like everyone else.

She is afraid and the scientists are not helping. Even when they bring in other Galra to help with their studies. They grow more deeply weary when one particularly brazen Galra refuses to heed her warning to stay back. 

“I’m no human, Acxa.” She’d given a smug sneer and took her arm. 

The only difference that had made was that the poison worked slower. Instead of liquifying on the spot, it happened over a series of several days. Her skin had the appearance of fire working over old paper. Rings of black, rimmed with luminescent magenta plagued the Galra woman’s skin until there was nothing left to burn away. 

Acxa is isolated they draw her blood and bone marrow. They take skin samples and hair samples and they do it from a distance. She grows to hate the needles, her skin at the injections sites are swollen and blotchy. 

She wraps her arms around herself, she hates being alone. 

A few days later one of the scientists, a human man strikes up conversation. Nothing of her toxicity, just a simple inquiry about what life is like in space and about the Galra culture. She is thankful for this man. He must have put in a good word because they treat her better now.

She feels less imprisoned and more quarantined. It isn’t much better, but it is a step up. They bring her books and from afar teach her how to read human writing. She is happy for the stimulation. They allow the Paladins and Ezor and Zethrid to visit her. 

She asks them not to talk about the weather or about the outside world. It only leaves her with a sense of depressive longing. She spends months there and no one gets any closer to figuring out why she is so poisonous to touch or how she came to be that way. 

What they do tell her is that its potency is decreasing and that she can probably have her freedom back by the end of the month. They have few answers for her but they do confess that they have been mistaken in treating her so harshly. 

They inform her that they think she is both poisonous and poisoned. That she is poisonous because she has been poisoned herself. That something in her blood or genetics has kept the poison from destroying her but that same thing has been keeping it trapped within her. 

She is in some bizarre and hazardous state of detox. 

The last week of it is the worst. She thinks that it will kill her after all. But it doesn’t. With one searing headache and several bouts of throat burning vomiting, it is out of her system. She is curled up in the corner clutching her stomach by the end of it, but it is over. 

They leave her in the room for a few days extra, a cautionary measure. 

They test her toxicity by putting her in close contact with a death row inmate; he lives. 

And because he lives, she gets to live. 

Truly live. 

They open the door to the facility a brighter and harsher light replaces fluorescent light. Keith walks her out of the compound. Her heart flutters, it is more than a relief to have comforting contact again. She leans into him. And not just into him. She has never had what they call a group hug before. But she enjoys the concept. 


	11. Uneven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Slice  
> Fandom: Avatar The Last Airbender  
> Summary: Azula takes her hair cut too far.   
> Warning: Accidental Self Harm

Her hair falls away. Strand by strand it falls at her feet. It deserves it. It is being messy and uncooperative. She snarls and gives it another good sliding chop. But now her bangs are uneven. Her lips curl back again. She swipes her scissors across her bangs once more. 

But no, that isn’t right either. No, no, no!

She cuts away again but Agni, she can’t make them even. 

Why can’t they just be even?

Right now she is a messy disgrace to her own eyes.

Horrible. 

She snips again over and over until there is more hair on the floor than on her head. She wants to scream. She thinks that she does. 

They. Still. Aren’t. Even. 

There is a flicker of satisfaction when there is nothing left to cut. But it is only a little instant. The teeniest fraction of a moment before her lower lip begins to tremble. She sinks to the floor, gripping her head. What has she done?   
  


She feels a sharp pang. 

The scissors, they are still in her hand. 

She looks at her palm. They are  _ in  _ her hand. Her stomach goes queasy as blood wells around them. She thinks to pull them out, she is glad for her intense battle training. She has always been told to leave a sword in her belly if it finds its way in. 

That doesn’t make her feel any less anxious about the scissors embedded in her palm. Her entire hand is throbbing now, finding most intensity where the scissors are jammed. 

Her brows furrow upon feeling small trickles of warmth running down the sides of her head. With her good hand she feels along the surface. Her stomach churns as it more fully sets in that she has cut her hair to the point of being bald. And her unease grows further when she feels the welts and cuts. She hadn’t been careful. With her violent slashing and chopping she has managed to take out chunks of her scalp and slice it all up.

Azula pulls herself up on shaky legs and wanders towards the mirror. She backs away again, she doesn’t want to know. She decides that she should find the family physicians. She wanders into the hallway, it is so deeply quiet. 

Rattlingly so. 

It leaves her broken mind plenty of room to fill the silence with its own whispers. 

In the voices of those she knows, mostly her father and Zuzu, they call her names. Tell her that they are disgusted with her and that she is foolish and reckless and unsightly. She doesn’t think that she can disagree with them. 

They distort the hallway, making it seem somehow eerie and foregin. The blood beats behind her ears and flows into them. 

She is bleeding all over and no one is around. She has banished the lot of them. The queasiness in her belly swells as she makes her way down another vacant hallway. There is no one to help her and she is…

She is afraid. 

A small and stifled cry escapes her throat. 

Her coronation is in a few hours and she isn’t yet dressed nor groomed. She is wandering around with a bloody scissor in her hand and a slashed up head. As shaky and dazed as she is, she doesn’t watch her footing. Her foot catches on a bunched up portion of the rug that spans the length of the hallway and she topples. 

She has the sense and reflexes to catch herself before her face can meet the floor, but she doesn’t have the sense to remember to use her arms instead of her hands. She screams as the pain catches up to her. The scissors have now pierced her hand all the way though. She can see them sticking out the back of her hand. 

Her father laughs and tells her that she should have been smarter than that, should have had some common sense. Zuko ask if it reminds her of Mai and her knives. He tells her that Mai would have stabbed her like that if she could have. 

And her mother…

Her mother is the worst; she tells her that she is worried about her. That she wants to help. She tells Azula to tell her what she can do to help.

The distraught princess very nearly cups her hands over her ears. She stops herself at the last moment. The scissors are mere centimeters away from penetrating her ear. She realizes that it wouldn’t have mattered, it is only the handles that jut from her palm now. For a moment she simply sits with her knees drawn to her chest taking in heavy and panicked breaths. 

She doesn’t know where anyone is. 

She needs someone.

Anyone. 

Even Zuzu, the real Zuzu would do if he could safely take the scissors out of her hand or take her to someone that could. 

Perhaps if her mind was securely with her, she would be able to do it herself. But right now…

Right now she is useless and she is trembling too much for her own hand to be of any use. A sharp flare breaks out near her sternum. She realizes that she has sliced her abdomen during the fall. 

She is slicing herself to ribbons. They are going to find her curled up on the floor in tatters. She forces herself to stand again and wanders towards the throne room. Her head is hazy she isn’t sure if it is with insanity or with blood loss. Maybe both. 

She leans herself up against one of the pillars. 

There is a lot of blood, more than she could have imagined. Agni knows how much more there would have been if she had plucked the scissors out. It already spurts from her torso like a fountain. And it leaks steadily from her head, creating a miniature pool around her. She realizes that she has left a pretty decent trail of it from the hall to the throne room.

Overcome by a wave of fatigue, she curls herself up on the floor between those pillars.

No one comes to check on her. 

Not before her vision blurs and blackens, anyhow. 

She wakes up on a bed with her hand carefully bandaged. She brings her finger to her abdomen, there are no bandages there, but her fingers brush over stitch work. And when she brings them to her head she finds a mix of bandage and stitch. She shudders. 

“Azula, believe it or not, I’m glad that you’re awake.” It is Zuko. “Katara and I found you. We thought that you were…”

“You can say dead, Zuzu…” she trails off. 

“Yeah, we thought that you were dead.”

“You should have left me that way.” It is more of an impulse outburst. But she feels it all the same. 

“I’m not going to just let you die.”

She rubs her eyes, they have gone watery. She almost says she wants to die, but that can’t be true. Not if she had wandered out of her room to look for help. She thinks that, that is what she wants; help. Help and someone to tell her that it will be okay. 

Someone that will help her make it okay. 

“What happened, anyways?”

She isn’t sure. 

She doesn’t remember. 

She doesn’t even recall how she’d managed to stab herself so forcefully with those scissors. 

She doesn’t remember having done it at all. 

“I--I…” she trails off. “It just…” 

Zuko’s expression softens. 

“You think that I’m crazy, don’t you?” She thinks that she is. 

“I think that you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. Father is good at building it up.” He pauses. “The doctors told me to remind you to clean your hand every now and again, I think that you can remember on your own, right?”

Azula nods. “I…” she starts again. “I need…” she struggles to get it out.

“You need…?”

“I need help.”

Zuko offers her a soft smile. “Yeah, I needed it for a while too. Believe it or not, getting it isn’t as painful as you think it will be.” 

“Is it more or less painful than impaling your hand.”

“It’s probably somewhere in between.” 

Azula sighes. She supposes that she is about to find out for herself. 


	12. One To The Dirt One To The Pyre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Burn  
> Fandom: BBC Robin Hood  
> Summary: Isabella is executed for witchcraft.   
> Warnings: Physical abuse and implied sexual abuse.

They aren’t particularly unjustified when they bind her hands with rope. They aren’t exactly in the wrong about their accusations. But they don’t know the full story. They don’t know what he has put her through. They just took his word for it. They just followed his pointed finger. 

Isabella supposes that she hadn’t gone about it in the most intelligent way. The curse was a success, God, it was a success. But she hadn’t covered her tracks well enough this time. She has cast spells before but never one so potent. 

She might be on her way to the pyre, but he is on his way to the dirt. With any luck they will mistake him for dead and bury him several days too soon. He will wake to pitch darkness and the smell of damp dirt and worm. The taste of nature herself. 

Isabella smiles. It deserves a slow and agonizing death. She looks at the scars and bruises on her arms. The same brand that decorate her neck and collar and her torso. The ones that pair so well with the welts on her back and thin lines that match his whip. 

She doesn’t regret what she has done. 

She only regrets that she has left traces of it in such plain sight. 

Her hands were her own downfall. They smelled of herbs and spices. The witch’s scent is accompanied by dirt and residue beneath her fingernails. They might have taken it for days spent toiling in a garden had she not been the bride of a lord. If not that then it would have been the smear of rat’s blood. And if not the rat’s blood then it would have been the black stain on her fingers. 

Normally she wears gloves but she had been careless and they have seen the permeate discoloration from years of spellwork and potion making. And now, just as her dreadful husband is beginning to decay alive, she is being walked to the stake. 

It is deeply autumn, he favorite time of the year. The trees are vibrant and rustling, shaking off their leaves with each sway. There is a tinge of warm cider in the air and a fragrance of cinnamon. Of dried straw and crops teeming for harvest. 

It is a shame that she won’t live to celebrate the harvest. It is the one time of the year that she feels fully alive, fully free. When the moon flares full and golden-orange and the beer kegs flow more freely. When the feast is magnificent even to the peasant class. When Robin shows his face for only a good time and some ale. 

They will likely build the bonfire up from the same wood that she is to be burned upon. She doesn’t resist as they bind her to it. Maybe if she truly had the power they accuse her of having, she’d put up a fight. But she is admittedly too demure. Something of a sheep that has finally had enough. She finds that even sheep are quite aggressive brutalized regularly.

But Isabella has gone passive again. She has thrown all of her seething and spite into the poison she’d be dying for and as no fight left in her. It is a shame that she won’t know a life without the beatings and beratings. 

Though she hasn’t any fight, she holds her head high. And higher still as Prince John addresses her. “It’s such a shame that such an elegant lady would…” he twirls his hand. “Get acquainted with such nasty things.”

She would like to pretend that the nasty thing she has gotten acquainted with is Thornton. 

“A witch…” a declares with an exaggerated sweeping of his arms. It is more for the crowd than for her. “Black magic. She has poisoned her own husband.”

The crowd leers. 

“Do you deny this?”

“I savor it.” She snarls. 

“And unrepentant!” Prince John flinches. His theatrics are growing tiresome. She almost yearns for them to just light her up so she doesn’t have to hear it anymore. “An evil creature with no remorse.” 

Really she has only done one thing. Mostly she uses her herb work and potions to care for migraines, stomach pains, and other aches and illnesses. And mostly she uses her magik and rituals to promote luck and prosperity and sometimes, if she is feeling daring, clairvoyance. Really nothing noteworthy nor harmful. 

It is just this one thing, this one dark deed. 

She doesn’t think that, that makes her evil. And is it really so evil, so unjustified, to rid herself of an abuser? 

According to all of Nottingham, her practices and rituals are far more foul than Thornton’s own practices. It is a ritual of its own the way he tears her clothes from her and throws her into bed and…

Yes, he is getting what he deserves. 

Prince John is still prattling as while she scans the crowd. She finds Robin and she wonders if he will save her. They have ended things on such a sour note and they are left with little fondness for one another. But he does seem like the sort who would try to help her regardless, unless that is dashed by a hatred of her heathenism. 

She finds Thornton front and center and he looks horrible. His eyes pierce into her, but they lack their ferocity. They are tired and have bags that span acres. His cheeks are hollow and his complexion is corpse-like, shot with raven feather-black veins. 

She flashes him a smirk. She might be a dead woman but soon his veins will burst and his flesh will rot away and he will still breathe. At least her suffering will be over within the day. His own returned smirk is her only warning.

The match has been thrown. 

It takes a moment, one long and horrible moment. But the flames burst up. She hadn’t expected it to get so hot, so soon. The fire is still only a small blaze; perhaps she is just imaging the heat before it truly rises. Albeit, it doesn’t take long for that blaze to reach her toes. When it gets there it is torment. Her nerve endings flare as the fire eats away her feet. 

Isabella holds back a scream, her lips twitch into a snarl and she makes a point of holding Thornton’s stare. Part of her still hopes that Robin will come to her aid. That hope is squandered and that part of her burns away when the fire makes it to her knees. 

She still suppresses her screams, has bitten her cheeks and a chunk of her tongue off in the effort. She lets the blood drain from her mouth and drizzle onto her chin. 

A mistake.

The crowd takes a uniformed step back and one voice calls out, “it’s more witchcraft!”

She never guessed that Nottingham had such a surplus of fools. When the fire reaches her hips she finally cries out. Her legs have already blackened, there is no skin left to melt, there is only equally blacked bone. Blackened bone and the smell of burning meat and muscle tissue. 

The less sadistic of the towns folks slip away. The more respectful of them, simply turn their heads. The smell has pushed several people to heave. She would think that they are the ones on the pyre. 

By the time the fire reaches her stomach, Isabella wishes that she were dead. Not that it is her first time itching with such a desire. Still she holds her glare. Unwavering. Hateful. Thornton turns away, but she knows that he can still feel her hatred burning and simmering perhaps hotter than even the fire. 

She roars with it when it reaches her chest. It quite literally boils her blood. It runs down her skeleton with skin that slowly sloughs away to meet the wood below. It is just as well, she knows that the relentlessly searing pain will be over soon. The fire only needs to lick and strip the flesh and muscles above her heart and then burn that away. 

But the fire climbs to her face before that happens. 

This is the worst part. This is when her eyes finally leave Thornton. In an instant her vision flashes a vivid yellow-white and then it goes black and she feels jelly running down her cheeks. She is spasming now, reflexively thrashing and jerking against the chains that hold her in place. 

And then it is over, her charred body still, her last breath wafts up to the sky with the smoke. She didn’t use it to curse them all. She didn’t have to. They had damned themselves in killing her, because she is the one who knew how to put him down…

The full moon rises on festival night and in the midst of their bonfire, Thornton bites into the neck of Prince John. 


	13. All The Lights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Experiment  
> Fandom: Once Upon A Time  
> Summary: Regina is abducted by aliens who run an experiment on her.

There is a distinct humming, rhythmic and steady. It is the soundtrack to the darkness that she can't seem to pry herself from.

Regina blinks several times before her eyes remain open. Open and squinting against a harsh light. She has seen other lights, all sorts of them. Too many of them. The day began with the light of the sun. It closed with the setting of the sun. And then the moon cast its own light as she climbed into her car. There was the light of her phone when she called Emma to tell her that she was on her way home. She'd seen several lights in the sky, strange lights, a ring of them that were orange in color. She didn't stare at them for too long because she found herself looking into one more set of lights.

Headlights.

And then there was no more light.

Her hand has tingles running through it like TV static. She realizes that her entire body feels as though it has been injected with static, a painless electricity. She winces to herself and tries to get a sense of where she is.

On an operation table, staring at white lights, she realizes. And it comes back to her; the sound of screeching tires, the smell of hot rubber and smoke, the sound of crunching metal and cracking glass. A burst of an airbag and a burst of pain. A shout. A few of them.

Regina tries to speak but her mouth refuses to move, to fully annunciate her words. The doctors and surgeons probably have her numb. It strikes her that they should know by now that she is somewhat resistant to anesthesia.

She tries to sit up but her body refuses to move. Whatever they have administered, it has paralyzed her. Her heart begins to race, what if they don't notice. What if they begin to operate while she is still…

She feels a prick on her head and winces. The prick is followed by a thin slicing sensation. A very clean cut. Precise as a laser. She is dimly aware that she should be in rather dreadful pain, but after the initial prick she feels only a tickle. A mild sense of discomfort. Her panic is unrelated to the sensation. The panic is the product of a gathering awareness that she is not in a hospital at all. That she has no idea where she is.

The beam traces a circle on her head and her body shudders as hands come to open her skull. The hands are long and slender, ashy grey in color. She forces her lips to move, to demand them to stop. She only manages to get out a weak, "no."

The creature hesitates. It comes to loom over her and puts an elongated finger to her lips. Her breathing quickens. It shakes its misshapen head and caresses her cheek almost lovingly. She can't detect any hostility from the creature. She still doesn't trust it. It turns her head away from it and to the side.

She sees another operating table. A second alien lays upon it, its big eyes dazed and hazy. The first one turns her head back to face it and brushes her cheek again. She doesn't know what it is trying to tell her, but it pulls out a small magenta marble. Only when it rests it on her tongue does she realize that it is not glass but a slime. Or a gummy. And closes her mouth and forces her to swallow.

It waits a few moments, until the white light seems to spin and the color begins to shift. Her world is growing fuzzy again. Small orbs and sparkles flash in prismatic colors across her vision. The hum of the lights distorts into a hauntingly beautiful melody.

She doesn't notice when the alien pulls back part of her skull to reveal her brain with a series of wet crunches. It's fingers are careful and its eyes observant. It wanders away from her and over to its companion.

The alien on the table is still, it has been dead for some time. For many years, in fact. It had been cherished and it will be cherished again, even if it will have to re-learn and adjust. The living alien cuts a chunk from its brain and feeds it into the syringe.

This time it will work.  
It must work. There is only one part of the brain that has not yet been tried.

The alien comes back to Regina and carefully slips the needle into her brain. It is harder, much harder to handle a brain that still beats with life. If done wrong, the host body will begin to twitch and convulse; another experiment failed.

The alien is tired of failure.

It misses its lover.

The needle works its way into the throbbing mass and the alien releases its contents. It carefully draws the needle out and waits for the spasms that will tell it that it has failed again. But the convulsions don't come and the human, the new host, is still oblivious. It has until her eyes gleam with awareness to patch her back up.

It fixes her skull back in place and returns to its laser, flicking it into sealing mode. It traces the same circle around her head until the skin and bone are welded together once more. It comes back to her side and strokes her face. Her eyes are still distant and uncomprehending. For a human she is a lovely thing. It brushes her hair back and injects her neck. Her hazy eyes dim further and then they close.

It will take her back home.

It will check up on her, monitor her.

And when the time comes it will take her again.

It presses several buttons and they are, in a beam of orange, on the side of the road. It doesn't want to hurt her, but there are things that must be done to avoid attention. It slams her head onto the dashboard, a shard of glass embeds itself there. The human is slumped over the wheel, her vehicle wrapped around another. It thinks that the other driver is dead. The other driver had been on the wrong side of the road anyways, it thinks that the dead driver should have been paying attention. But it can't be too disgusted, the driver had done the hard work for it.

It takes the human woman's hand as flashing lights and blaring sirens draw precariously near.

**.oOo.**

She hasn't felt right since the accident. Emma insists that she only needs to be patient and that she's still recovering. But Emma can't explain why she is seeing things more vividly, why sights are sharper and colors are more vibrant. Why she is seeing colors that she can't describe to Emma.

It isn't necessarily a terrible wrongness, isn't that the feeling of something being off is terrifying. It is more or less confusing and unsettling. But there are undercurrents of pleasantness to it. She likes to sit on the roof of her manor. This startles Emma because she has never been particularly fond of stargazing before.

Regina still isn't particularly entertained by the sight of them. It is their music. She can hear them, their voices are unique, not one sounds the same. Admittedly, it was maddening at first. Every night of the first week she would be on the floor clutching her head and yelling for them to stop.

Yelling and begging until Emma brought her to the hospital a second time and had her assessed for brain damage. The results aren't yet in, but she has learned how to block the stars out and how to pick out particular voices.

She can hear the planets too; the moon sounds like the tinkle of wind chimes, the sun is loud and crackling, saturn has the likeness of a Tibetian singing bowl. As though a mallet is being dragged over its rings.

She likes Saturn the best.

Emma joins her on the roof and slaps an enclosed envelope into her lap. "The results are in."

"There's nothing wrong with me, Emma." She says softly. "I haven't…"

"I know." Emma laughs, cupping her hand over Regina's. "But now you'll have the paperwork to prove it. I know that you like paperwork."

Regina rolls her eyes and opens the envelope. She scans over the results and furrows her brows.

"What?" Emma asks, suddenly sitting upright. "What is it? Do you have brain damage?"

She shakes her head. "Emma can you...check something for me?" She parts the hair on the back of her head.

Emma holds her phone flashlight to it. She too knits her brows. "Wha-what did that?"

Regina tries to remember. She remembers lights. The sun, the moon, phone lights, headlights, and…

And what?

She knows that there was something else. That she had seen more lights.

"Where did you find me that night?"

"In your car, Regina. Behind the wheel."

Her control lapses for a moment. And for that moment the stars scream. All at once, their song is disharmonious and jarring. She can hear her brain beating, feel it throbbing and pulsing in her skull. There is a flare of pain. She slumps over, burying her face in her palms. The noise in her head swells and then a smooth voice cuts through it. Feminine, kind. It gives her something to focus on. At first she thinks that it is Emma's voice. It is rather similar.

"You will be fine." It says "Everything is fine." An image surfaces on her mind, a swirling misty blue planet. Gauzy and gossamer like the wings of a morpho. It has the feeling of a first winter snow, pristine and gentle.

Her body relaxes, though she can't explain why.

The voice slips away, the vision fades. The feeling of Emma's hand on her back returns. "Let's get you back inside."

Regina nods and lets Emma help her crawl back through the window.

**.oOo.**

It watches the human and her lover disappear through the window. It doesn't understand why the human is taking things so hard. It tries to understand, but it can't. It senses unease from the human.

And it loses hope. This human seemed so receptive and logically driven and yet she is rejecting the second consciousness. It doesn't understand her hesitance. Its lover is willing to share. The human's body and brain isn't exactly what its lover is looking for, but it is willing to work with the human and accept her limits.

The alien slips away, the human is not yet ready to come home.


	14. The Blooms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Plant Growth  
> Fandom: Legend Of Korra  
> Summary: After trying to cut them away to harness their power, the spirit vines find a new home in Kuvira.

Sleep has never come easy to her, even after a long and satisfying day. Her thoughts are too loud and her ambitions never quiet. Plans dance around in her head, ideas that she needs to expand upon and fine tune. It is only when she pushes her body well past the point of exhaustion that she can finally sleep.

This is likely why she so deliberately over-exerts herself. But it is just as well, she has had a very productive day. The most productive that she has had in a very long while. If all goes as planned, she will have her mechsuit ready by the end of the month.

She rolls onto her side, unsure of why she is still having so much trouble sleeping. Her body is completely spent. Drained to the point where her arms have one weak and limp. An all encompassing soreness is her companion for the night. One of two anyhow. She nuzzles herself up against Baatar. The man snores softly and she thinks that he is lucky. He can rest.

Kuvira sighs and rubs her temples. She rests her head on Baatar's chest and tries to let the beating of his heart lull her to sleep.

When she wakes, she wishes that she hadn't fallen asleep at all, she is painfully stiff. It feels as though concrete has been generously poured into her veins. Perhaps she shouldn't work herself so hard after all. She struggles to pull herself up right and rubs her aching biceps. She winces, even stretching her arms that induces leaves a sharp staining sensation between her shoulder blades. She inhales deeply and brings the ends of her palms to rest on the edge of her bed. She can't quite bring herself to let her feet touch the floor yet.

"Raava's tendrils, Kuvira!" Baatar exclaims. "That looks painful, what happened?"

Her brows knit. "Hmm?"

She feels his touch just to the right of her left shoulder blade. Ignoring the sharp pangs, she stretches her arm across her neck and feels the spot where his pointer had been. Her lip curls into a deeper wince; there is a fairly large knot there and she wonders if she had dislocated or herniated something.

"I'll get you an ice pack." He offers. Kuvira nods and lets her body drop back to the mattress. She lays on her side and stares at the wall. She doesn't like it, not when she is so close to achieving her goals, but she decides that a day off is called for.

Baatar comes back with the promised ice pack and holds it between her shoulder blades. For the first few minutes it is peaceful and then the pulsing begins, slow and rhythmic. It pushes and seems to stretch her skin before receding and burrowing into her muscle tissue. Raava, it feels that way anyhow. She presses her face into the pillow and tries to suppress and cry.

Baatar removes the ice pack and opts to rub her back instead, taking care to avoid the knot on her shoulder. By noon she grows restless and forces herself out of bed, there are things to be done and she can't just laze around because of a knot between her shoulders. At the very least she can make her way to her desk and look over design schematics with Baatar.

Her fiance doesn't particularly like the idea but she is adamant that she could use the distraction.

He cares for her throughout the day, his concern arises an hour or so from when they begin looking over the blueprints. She manages to stumble her way into the bathroom where she loses what little she has had to eat. He does her the kindness of holding her hair back.

For the longest time she simply lays there on the bathroom floor with Baatar trying to convince her to crawl back into bed. But her stomach is cramping, her throat burns, and her shoulders beat. The sensation has spread down along her spine.

She tastes something like moldy cucumbers on her tongue.

Her mouth is a mess of rumey green ooze and what looks like brown speckled, red petals.

Baatar leaves her side only to get a towel to clean her face with. He tosses that aside and lefts her from the floor and back into bed. She still feels queasy and lightheaded. She bunches up, arms tightly clutching her abdomen. Baatar finds a place in bed next to her and cups his hands atop hers. It is at least faintly comforting to feel him pressed against her back.

She tries to close her eyes and drift off but the throbbing keeps her from it. By sundown the first lumps rise. They are small at first, like mosquito bites and some are even smaller. She shudders as she rubs her fingers over them.

She is beginning to think that maybe something in the swamp had bitten her or that she has picked up some sort of parasite.

"Baatar?"

The man rubs his cheek against her back. She repeats his name and this time he answers with a, "yeah?"

She takes his hand and runs his finger over the cluster of bumps and he furrows his brows. He helps her to sit up right and pushes her shirt up. There are more of these bumps on her belly and sides and they are bigger than those that decorate her arms. He pulls her shirt over her head; there are bumps on her chest too and one on her neck.

"Baatar, what's wrong with me?" She mumbles.

"I…" he begins. "I don't know, let's take you to the infinity and see what they have to say about it."

This isn't reassuring.

She swears she feels something twitching and shifting beneath the lumps.

She gets out of bed and Baatar makes out as if to carry her. She shakes her head, "I can walk." She hopes that she can. She doesn't fancy the idea of being rendered so dependant and vulnerable. At the very least she has to make it past her soldiers. She holds her head as high as she can for the aches and pains and with a posture as intimidatingly professional as possible for wearing her hair so disheveled and pajamas so baggy.

As soon is she makes it past the compound's recreation and dining areas and the door seals, she lets Baatar lift her up again. Rather, her legs buckle and he catches her. She is feeling twitchy and agitated. Her arms are beginning to itch all over. "They're bug bites." She says. "They have to be." She flinches when her nails accidentally break skin. She hadn't realized that she'd been scratching _that_ hard.

She also hadn't realized that the skin had feel away to reveal something like a small blade of grass.

The itching intensifies and she is quite physically jerking to the point where Baatar sets her down and tells her, "you're making this a little difficult can you try to stop…" His face scrunches. "Shit!"

Kuvira stops clawing at her arms and follows the line of his sight. His gaze is fixed on her left arm and she knows why. They are bloodied by the scratching, not terribly so, just a few droplets and one or two thin and leaking trails. The blood wells around what looks like stems. Stems that range in thickness from hairlike to a thicker string.

Admittedly, her hands are trembling as she takes one of the thinner ones between her fingers and pulls. Her stomach lurches as she drags the strand out, it has the sensation of dragging a razor across her arm.

"Maybe you should just leave it alone…"

Kuvira shakes her head, "I have to get it out. I have to get them out." She lets out a sharp cry as what she imagines is another strand, explodes from the lump between her shoulder blades. In synchrony two of the bumps on her stomach burst as well as the small ones on her other arm.

She feels blood running warmly over her spine. It wells up and creates a growing ring on her pastel green shirt. She abandons her desperate pulling and claps her hands over the puncture on her belly. She can't lay back lest she agitate her shoulder blade and she can't slump forward. So she holds herself stiffly up right as the stems on her arms elongate.

She throws her head back as another explodes from her neck, a spray of blood spatters her cheek and shoulders. It dirites Baatar's glasses. Petals unfurl from the wound. Her body shakes while the stems grow into a budding ivy. They spill out of and over her arms, boasting leaves.

"Cut them off, Baatar!"

Baatar hesitates before stammering, "I'll get something to do it with."

"The tools we used too…" She winces. "Get weed killer."

He nods and she is alone.

She is alone when the flower in her neck snakes around her arm.

She is alone when the writing begins in her stomach.

She is alone when she feels something tickling the back of her throat.

Her eyes well with tears and she finds herself hoping that she will bleed out before the vines begin to choke her from within. A soft crackles fills her ears and she can't help but to utter a soft whimper. She knows what this means. She knows several minutes before her eardrum ruptures and another flower blooms within.

Though it is the vine in her belly that worries her the most, or maybe it isn't a single vine but a writhing and undulating mass of them. She dreads that they will explode from her stomach at any one in her throat curls around her tongue and induces her gag reflex.

This time she does fall over. Her head meets the floor and more of the sap like ooze spills from her mouth alongside saliva and petals. Her body is rigid with pain and contorted strangely. She lies on her side with her spine arched back, her left arm is wrapped around her middle and the right stretches down towards her legs-she had meant to reach out but her brain is cluttered.

By the time Baatar makes it back to her, the vines are blanketing her and the one in her stomach is protruding much further. Sense and rationality gives way to impulse and reflex. To desperate and illogical self-preservation. It is in her stomach and she can't let it leave, not from the exit it desires. She rips the weed killer from Baatar's hands. It burns her throat as it goes down. She screams as it works its way down and sears her esophogus. But that vine, that fucking vine in her throat withers.

She'd rather die by her own hand with chemicals in her belly than with the vine bursting from her stomach.

Baatar's expression of horror is unparalleled when she begins gagging. This time it is blood that comes up. Blood and stomach acid and chunks of vine. Dead or not, the rest of the vine is lodged in her throat and she can't breathe.

She reaches for Baatar, her fingers grasping at air. And then she claws at her throat until her vision goes fuzzy. Finally Baatar acts, he punctures another hole in her throat and suddenly she can breathe again.

She thinks that he has only prolonged her suffering.

Kuvira is dizzy with blood loss and more is bubbling from her breathing hole. The last of her awareness is wasted on realizing that she shouldn't have abused that swamp and its vines.

She doesn't expect to wake up in a hospital.

She doesn't expect to wake up at all.

But she does wake up and she is afraid to open her eyes.

She does so anyhow and sees the faces of Baatar and the Avatar. She knows that his hand is interlocked with hers and that there is an intense and all encompassing pounding in her body. She knows that she can still feel the vines.

What she doesn't know is how it is that she is still alive and for how long she will stay that way. Nor does she know what condition her body will be in should she remain alive.

She is too afraid to look.

She squeezes Baatar's hand.


	15. Death In Baby Blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Crystal  
> Fandom: Winx Club  
> Summary: On Halloween night, Icy crystalizes herself.  
> Warnings: Suicide and Self-Harm

When people think of death they think of red. Red like blood. Like hearts. Like vicera. Or maybe grey like brain matter or certain organs. They often think of black; the black that comes with eternal sleep, the black of mourning, the black of the reapers robes that billow in the wind. They never think of baby blue or that it is not a color at all but clear.

But Icy does. Death is always baby blue or clear.

As clear is an absence of color, death is an absence of life.

Death is clear and it is delivered in soft shades of blue.

Icy is not afraid of death.

She is not afraid of pain.

She has lost her fear of death long ago and gained an intrigue for pain.

Icy often likes to coax death to call if forward, sometimes in more mundane ways-the swallowing of pills or a blade to the wrists-other times she gets creative. She drinks certain potions and poisons just to see the effects. She purcecess ancient torture devices and tests them on herself.

It isn't so much about the sadness anymore, but the art and poetry of a unique death. An over appreciation for funeral rites and mourning aesthetics. The beauty of a velvet coffin lining and an arrangement of flowers and lit candles. Tea lights that fade out like a life evanescent.

The deliciously subtle atmosphere of oppressive somber, the one that feels like a breath on your back when you're all alone.

Her depression, though ever present, is replaced by curiosity and intrigue. She looks over heaps of classwork and report cards. Studying has gone stale and she no longer feels particularly interested in pursuing any sort of career. She had a goal at one point, she had many of them. Power, world domination, and other highly ambitious, sinister endeavours. But the longer she tries for them, the closer she gets to achieving them, the hollower they feel.

She thinks of taking her ambitions down to a more normal level, to pursue a position as a high priestess for the dark arts. She can achieve this easily, she has the grades, repute, and power for it.

But she no longer fancies it.

Not as she fancies a gentle kiss from the reaper itself. A kiss so frigid that it would put her to shame and thrill her in one fell swoop.

She stretches her arms, takes a swig of absinthe, and decides that she is ready.

It is the perfect night to die; all hallow's eve and with a bright full moon. She hears that there is supposed to be an eclipse to boot.

Darcy and Stormy have departed three hours prior for a night of trickery and horrors. At Darcy's rather well-concealed expression of concert, she promised to join them in a few hours after working through the last of her thesis.

Halloween is her favorite night of the year, she thinks that it only makes sense to celebrate it by letting her soul drift away on the October clouds. She takes one more sip and makes her way down the hall.

She will steal away into the forest and do the deed at the climax of the eclipse.

"Headmistress Griffin." She nods her head.

Griffin furrows her brows, "why aren't you out wreaking havoc with the others?"

"I have my own chaos to cause." She shrugs. "An ambitious solo project, if you will."

Griffin smirks, "well I do look forward to seeing the result. You never disappoint."

And she won't this year either.

The forest is shrouded and the animals are several shades of feral with the moon so round and shimmering as it is. They know and sense things. And maybe that is why they keep well away from her as she finds a space in the clearing.

The eclipse is well underway, casting the forest in an even stranger light. If she has timed this right, her body will go limp when the moon disappears. It will be quite a sight, she has perfected it quite well; the ability to harden her ice into crystal instead of letting it melt away.

But she needs more exuberance and intrigue than just a simple crystallization. She needs theatrics, drama, that poetry she craves.

They won't forget her, she won't let them. Nevermind how they will remember her. She didn't seek love in life and she certainly doesn't seek it in death. Only infamy and permanence, to be among the legends, those eerie tales that they tell by candle light when storm gales rock the foundations of the campus.

She closes her eyes and throws her hands up, a spike of ice bursts from the ground and impales her through the belly. She thinks to put one through her heart, but she won't be able to crystalize then.

She also won't have time to appreciate red running over clear. A think rivulet of blood trickles down the large icicle, until it hardens itself and becomes a part of the art. It hurts most dreadfully and her lips curve into a smile. It is more than she imagined. She is inclined to believe that there is a chunk of her clinging to the tip of the spike, a nice addition, she must say.

She inhales as deeply as she can with her lungs in such distress and she proceeds. She cools her body rapidly and coaxes several smaller spikes to rip out of her back, at her shoulder blades like frigid wings. And then even smaller spikes to add a nice shimmer to the rest of her back.

They give another spill of fine red-something to meet expectations. But the real death is the baby blue of her ice spikes-something to make her death memorable. With agony rippling all over, it is time to begin the crystallization.

She drops her temperature even further. Much deeper than she ever has and her skin begins to crackle. The soft light blue of frost spreads over her, taking her fingers and feet first and climbing from there until all but her face is covered. Until all but her face, brain, and heart have become pure ice.

She doesn't have much time now that her organs don't function. She wills the ice to crystalize and only after that is done does she let the frost curl its glimmering fist around her heart, brain, and face.

These will melt away

And they do melt away on the morning after her passing when the sun rises again. They find her at the very heart of the forest a faceless and macabre centerpiece glimmering like a diamond in the rising sun.

Mostly her death is clear and with a sprinkle of baby blue. But deep within the crystal and buried in her chest is a smear of red. She had died before the frost had reached her heart. And with her, her magic fled.

They don't move her.

It doesn't feel right to do so.

They don't cry for her.

This doesn't feel right either.

Death is not red but it is as chilly as they say.


	16. Diamond Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Glass/Shattered  
> Fandom: Once Upon A Time  
> Summary: Regina drinks glass.  
> Notes: Canon divergent, Regina never cast the dark curse and Emma is just a baby.

The Queen closes her eyes and brings the cup. The water in it glimmers with silvery powder. She doesn’t really have much of a choice. It is she or Ruby and she can’t lose another lover. At least she can pretend like she is drinking moon dust or a cup of stars.

She can pretend until the liquid is in her mouth and the tiny glass particles begin to shred her mouth and throat. She hopes that they are tiny enough to pass through with minimal damage. She doesn’t want to die, not when she has just found a reason to live. 

They let Ruby free, they unbind her and allow Regina to teleport her home. The last thing she feels is the woman’s lips on her own, a pleasant sensation to drive out the stings and burns. Ruby comes away with blood on her lips. 

Regina’s blood. 

Regina tries to smile, she thinks that she manages. And it is genuine because she knows love. After so long, she remembers what it is like.

Her touch lingers for a moment, but before Ruby can speak, she sends the werewolf home and safe. 

She doesn’t know who the hooded figures are, there are so many enemies that they could be. Frankly, killing her is probably justified. Part of her wishes that they would have killed her before she got a taste of love and hope. But love and hope aren’t for evil queens. 

She closes her eyes once more and finishes the glass. She shudders at the taste of copper in her mouth. The figures nod and make their departure. Her head falls forward and blood dribbles from her mouth. 

She has the decency to reflect. 

To feel sorry. 

To wish that she had met Ruby before she’d gone irreparably dark.

The glass shreds her insides, she can feel it happening. Her hope for a second chance shatters like the glass she had drank. It is a shame considering how close she had come. She thinks that there is some twisted poetry to it; she has shattered lives and dreams so they shattered glass and shattered the potential for redemption. 

She can hear it break and fall like the tinkle of a broken mirror. 

She coughs and more blood plops at her feet. She lets a few tears slip down her cheeks. She wants to live and find her happiness. She wants Ruby by her side. But she’d rather have Ruby safe. The tickle in her throat grows and she coughs again. And her cough agitates her throat more deeply. 

Soon she is coughing uncontrollably until she feels like she is eroading her throat. It is a mercy when her vision finally wanes. She goes limp and a mouthful of blood comes forward. 

**.oOo.**

Ruby has never seen The Queen look so fragile, so delicate. Her skin has gone startlingly pale, smears of blood are stark against it. She reaches out and checks for a pulse. However shattered, Regina is, she is still alive. Even so, Ruby is afraid to touch her, she doesn’t know how much damage has been done. 

She draws in a deep breath, she is lucky that she has come prepared, but is terrified that she has gotten it wrong and will only make things worse. The woman had drank glass and tore herself up within, all it should take is a healing potion. Ruby holds a small vial up, the liquid within glows a fluorescent lavender. 

She slips it between Regina’s lips and tips it back. 

Ideally the healing processes will be soothing and pain relieving as well as healing.

She lays down beside Regina and waits for her to stir. She is still afraid to do any more than clutch one of her hands and rest her other hand on The Queen’s cheek. Her skin is so cold, Ruby fears that she may be closer to death than she had imagined. 

She gives the woman’s lips another kiss. Her stomach tickles pleasantly at the burst of magic. 

The gently rippling power of true love’s kiss. She squeezes Regina’s hand tighter. The woman will be okay. 

**.oOo.**

However shattered her life has become, Ruby is there to help her pick up the pieces. 

She dreams of it still, of the glass ripping her throat apart; often these dreams are exaggerated, more horrifying than the real thing. In them, her throat is so terribly eroded by the glass that it opens completely and she dies convulsing on the floor surrounded by sneering faces. In other variations, they add to her demise with kicks and punches. In others still, they stab her with much larger shards or force her to chew on glass until she is hunched over and bloody all over with her hands shaking and tears running down her face. 

Tonight she is glass.

She swallows the glass and then becomes the glass. 

And once every inch of her skin has transformed, they close in and begin chipping away at her. She still doesn’t know who  _ they  _ are so her mind replaces  _ them  _ with people she has wronged, Snow, Charming, Rumplestilskin, The Hatter, and The Huntsman. 

All of them take turns with her until she is in glittering shards on the forest floor. And then her skin becomes flesh again and the ground is like that of a battlefield. They walk away and somehow she still feels the pain. 

It follows her into waking where she lies shivering and haunted. Disturbed and quite deeply traumatized. Ruby has gotten used to this, she helps The Queen to her feet and walks with her to the castle garden. She fetches her red cloak and wraps it around Regina and sits with her beneath the apple tree until her breathing slows and her tremors cease.

This time she sees her father peering at them from the window. He gives a slight smile and a wave and a warmth replaces that cold dread. He is proud of her, she is getting herself back together. She has someone to take away the pain of losing her stable boy. She leans into Ruby and lets her press kisses to her ear and neck. 

Sooner or later she is going to have to leave her castle and confront Snow and Charming. Sooner or later she is going to have to face everything. 

Tonight she will sit under the apple tree and try to forget the bloody images in her mind.


	17. An Eye For Penance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Extra Eyes  
> Fandom: Avatar The Last Airbender  
> Summary: Azula has visions of eternal punishment in the Spirit World.

She knows that she isn’t a good person, if she were, she would have nothing to fear. But she isn’t so she fears a lot and with good reason. She doesn’t quite remember the entirety of it, but she remembers how precise the bolt was. How powerful.Of course it was powerful, it was her to begin with. Just like her crown, Zuzu had stolen that and thrown it back at her. 

She remembers pain and her heart racing much too quickly before it stopped altogether. She remembers blackness. When she wakes she knows that she isn’t truly so. She is in the spirit world, she can tell by the color of the sky. It is a red so deep that the comet’s skies don’t compare; a blood red, a sinister red. The red of suffering to come. And then the red fades into a sickly yellow-brown.

Her chest throbs, though it isn’t the pulse of life but a burning beat. With each thrum comes a new searing flare. She brings her fingers to her chest and finds a gaping cavity, black around the edges. This must be where the lightning had found its mark.  
It doesn’t yet register to her to be afraid.   
Her mind hasn’t caught up yet. 

Azula realizes at a cool draft that she is naked. Naked and pale and--in comparison to the gnarled trees, boulders, and looming ancient shrines--small. She gets to her feet and her heart, dead and shriveling, falls to her feet.  
She staggers back with a small cry as things come together. 

She is in the Spirit World.  
She is not alive.  
She has died.   
She is dead.

Her fingers atop her ailing chest. The pain, she realizes, won’t go away. It won’t heal. She is stuck with that burning hollow feeling. She bends to pick up her heart but she doesn’t know where it has gone. Tears sting the corners of her eyes and she takes a few shaky steps forward. It has to be around somewhere. It had only just fallen and it hadn’t fallen far. 

She watches something snake around a tree; a silvery-grey eel creature. It coils around long-dead bark and stares at her with one glowing red eye.

“H-have you seen my heart?” 

It’s mouth twists into a mocking smirk, sharp teeth gleam starkly against a muted backdrop. It knows. She knows that it does. It answers with a laugh as it sinks back into its tree. She wanders about, looking under rocks and in thick bushes but her heart is as missing as it had been in life.   
But she wants it now.  
She needs it now. 

She sees several other spirits, each horrifying in their own right; a headless hog-monkey and a tall and stocky creature with muscles so dense that they threaten to rip the flesh surrounding them. There is a faceless thing that shudders and spasms on the ground as its body is eaten by fire and a creature made of teeth and brain.   
She finds several more twitching flaming creatures, before she comes to conclude that those were once people. Living people. Now dead and singed, flaming and screeching perpetually. 

Azula feels sick but her body has no outlet for it. She shovels her fear back and tries posing the same question to each spirit and tortured soul that she comes by, “have you seen my heart.”

Only one answers, the brain creature, “you don’t have one. Never did. Not here and not on the other side.” 

But she does.   
She did.   
She had felt it beating behind her ribcage. 

“I want my heart back.”

“If you wanted it, you should have used it.” The brain says, its teeth quiver as it speaks.

Something in her says that the brain has taken it. That something stirs with discontent and an edge of anger that breaks through her far. “It’s my heart! Give it to me.” She ought not to made demands of spirits but she is entitled to her own heart, Zuzu had no right to blast it out of her. 

“Very well.” It says calmly. “Follow me.”   
She should know better. On a more lucid day, she might have. But it is not a lucid day, she is terrified and her mind is not with her. So she follows the brain. It leads her to the edge of a pond. It looks like raspberry or strawberry jam or the innards of a cherry pie. “You want me to go in there?” She crinkles her nose. 

“Oh no.” It replies. It wiggles and shifts and a vein bursts free, it extends and points to a smaller hole. “It is down there.”

Azula wanders towards the edge of the crater. It is terribly small. Even for her, it will be a tight squeeze, at least until she makes it to the bottom where it widens out. At the last minute she realizes that the brain probably intends on pushing her forward. She jolts at a motion that doesn’t happen. 

“It’s in there.” The brain says again. 

She musters up the courage to peer further in and she sees it. Her heart is down there. She shudders again and swallows. She isn’t sure that she will be able to fit into such a narrow crevice but really, what does it matter, she is already dead. She supposes there are worse fates than being wedged in a hole for all eternity. She sucks in her tummy and slips herself into the rocky space. It is uncomfortable and had her lungs any function, they would be screaming in protest. The rocks are jagged and draw scratches and scrapes upon her back and belly as heaves herself down. 

Fear ripples through her mind when she finds herself chest deep and unable to go further. If her heart weren’t on the floor of this pit, it would be overwhelmed with dread. Her mind is. “I-I can’t…”

The brain hovers in front of her face. “You aren’t trying hard enough.”

“I am!” 

“I guess that you don’t really want it.” It sounds curiously like her father. 

“I do!” 

“Then try harder.” 

Tears burn in her eyes and she tries again, with more viciousness. She succeeds but the rocks shred her chest, opening the wound further. She feels a rock fall into the hole and find a home somewhere within her. And this is accompanied by her nose smacking against the wall and shattering. She screams and then screams again when her legs meet the floor of the pit and snap. 

She lays there face down, tormented and bleeding, her hair spilling over her shoulders. Shoulders that tremble as she cries. She reaches for her heart but it is not there. She lifts herself up as much as she can and screams again. A cry born of suffering, loss, and irritation. 

“What a good show.” The brain hovers above the pit. “Everyone is watching it.”

“What?” She manages through tears. The rocky wall opens up and something drops, it bounces off of her head and rolls to a stop. At first she thinks that it is a small rock and then it rolls again and looks at her.   
She only just comprehends it when more of them begin to fall. 

Azula scrambles back as quickly as her broken legs permit. Her back meets the other end of the wall and she feels a squelch as one of the eyes ruptures upon her skin. She shudders. “Don’t leave me down here!” She shouts for the brain. “You can’t leave me down here, I’m princess…”

One of the eyes lands in her mouth and she spits it out, gagging and grimacing. 

“I don’t even get a please.” The brain frowns. 

There are so many eyes now, they bury her waist deep and she can’t stand up. She doesn’t know where all of these eyes are coming from, nor whose they are. But they all stare at her, they all judge her. They judge her for her weakness, for her nakedness, and for the hole in her chest. They look into her eyes and they judge her past and her soul. This is worse then them ogling her venerable body. The depth of them reaches her stomach and then they stop falling. 

She still shivers, tears running down her cheeks. “At least let me have my heart.” 

This time she gets no answer. The sea of eyes undulates, they shift and form a wave. She goes tense and rigid because she knows what is going to happen. The first onslaught of them force their way into the gaping wound in her chest. She finds herself twitching and writhing as they invade her from within. And when she is laying in a heap they close in around her, blanketing over her and pushing until they fuse with her. 

Her screams grow into desperate shrikes as she tries to bat them off but her hands are already reduced to a cluster of eyes. Soon her whole body is a lumpy mass of them, all but her face. The eyes blink and flit about dumbly. 

She wants to go home.   
She wants to escape.   
She wants to die…

She is already dead.   
There is no way out.   
Azula shouts again, but this sound is more like a sob than a scream. There’s no way out, there’s no way out, there’s…  
She hadn’t even a chance. She doesn’t think that she had one, anyhow. She wishes that she could have gotten a warning. Something that would have saved her or at least salvaged her before this…

“I want to go home.” She whispers to herself. Truthfully she would be okay with her soul simply winking out of existence entirely as though it had never been there to begin with. “I want to go home.” 

She utters it again sounding smaller and smaller each time as days turn to weeks and weeks turn to months and months turn into centuries. Eventually she stops talking at all and simply lays there with her pain, with her shame, with her regrets. With those eyes blinking and bobbing upon her body. 

Sometimes they show her things. They are always the worst things; her most humiliating moments, her most mournful. They show her her fears and replay the unsavory moments; her mother scolding her, her father reprimanding and abandoning her, Mai and TyLee leaving her. And they remind her of the things she has done, they show her the outcomes.   
In the beginning she thinks that she was able to feel remorse but then she just feels hollow.

Just when she thinks that her mind is growing numb and desensitizing, they add something new to the mix and she is whimpering all over again. She has long since abandoned hope for release. 

She isn’t sure how many aeons have passed before the comes to linger over the pit again. Azula doesn’t say anything. She is beyond words and rational. Beyond repair. Even if she wasn’t she can’t imagine that there is anything to say. It might have said something, but she is too lost within the throes of unlife to comprehend or even hear.

When her lips finally do move it is more like muscle memory than anything produced by thought, “I want to go home. I just want to go home.” 

The brain tosses something down to her.  
She doesn’t recognize it.   
She simply stares at it as it beats rhythmically.   
She puts her head back down and nuzzles it against the rocky floor. 

“Take it.” The brain says.

She only reaches for it by impulse. Her fingers wrap around it but do little more. She doesn’t have the willpower nor reason to do much else. Other than let one or two more tears trickle down her cheeks.   
The eyes move her hand for her, Azula doesn’t resist their tug. A cluster of them roll out of her chest and make room for their companions to fix the object in place. It beats inside of her and she has the faintest impulse to feel relieved. Still, she can’t. She doesn’t feel much of anything anymore. Only fear, regret, and pain. 

She closes her eyes and the rest of the eyes close too.   
She thinks that she has had them shut for a very long time.  
And when she opens them she is laying on the floor of the coronation square.

She feels terribly woozy and shaky. There is a burning around her chest. Her body still shakes and her ears are ringing. Through the ringing she hears Zuko ask, “she’s dead, isn’t she?”

“She was.” 

“Was?”

“Only for a minute though.” Katara replies. 

“You brought her back?” 

“Just barely.” 

And her vision goes black again. 

Azula doesn’t say much for a very long time. She doesn’t really speak at all, she thinks that she has said maybe one or two things since they transferred her to the mental health facility nearly three months ago. 

She overhears them telling Zuko that she is catatonic. She mostly just stares at her hands. She overhears them admit that they don’t know how to help her. That they can barely get her to eat or drink, much less move about and have discussions. 

She doesn’t know how to help herself either. She doesn’t know how to process what she has seen, what she has felt, what she still feels when her dreams are particularly vivid or her hallucinations are hounding her. 

She can’t seem to shake the oppressive feeling of dread. A sense of inevitable doom. She is scared. Scared to live and terrified to die. That is the only reason she doesn’t hassle them when they feed and hydrate her. 

For the first time in ages, Azula feels the bed dip. “I take it you’re not doing so good?” Zuko asks. 

She spares him a look but she thinks that she might be looking right through him. She swallows hard. 

He takes her hand. “They say that you don’t talk at all.”

She doesn’t have anything to say. She can’t imagine that they’d understand or believe her. 

“I guess that it makes sense. Not many other people have died before.” Zuko continues. “Which is why I brought Aang with me. He might understand.” 

This pulls her out of her stupor for a moment. “I killed him.” Likely, it will be the only thing she says for several more months.

Zuko rubs the back of his head. “Uh...yeah.” 

.oOo.

When she does finally begin to speak again, it is very soft and sparingly. Aang comes to visit several times and several months come to pass. He finally manages to coax her into conversation when he mentions that there’s a sinister side of the Spirit World. That he has seen it and that he knows what it can be like. 

It is the first time she feels as though she isn’t truly insane.   
She doesn’t delve into the details, just that she knows that she needs to stay alive for as long as she can because she knows that suffering is the only thing that awaits her in death. She mentions the brain spirit and Aang seems to flinch. 

“Yeah, that one is...it scares me and I didn’t even do anything wrong...I don’t think.”

She only nods. 

“You don’t have to be afraid of dying.” Aang says. “It always happens one day.”

Her stomach lolls and she fights back tears. 

“You can come with me and help me clean up. There’s still a lot of war damage in the Earth Kingdom. And the Southern Water Tribe needs help growing.” He continues, “you’re really powerful and smart and I think that you can do a lot of good for the world.”

“Good?” 

“I know, confusing concept.” Toph crosses her arms. 

“What’s she doing here?” 

“You don’t really talk to me so I thought that maybe you’d talk to Toph.” Aang shrugs. 

“Oh.” 

.oOo.

She takes him up on his offer. She travels the world with he and Toph and then eventually just he alone after Toph’s declaration that she doesn’t ever want to go to a place where the temperature drops that low.

Azula doesn’t fancy it either but she is used to things that discomfort her. Mostly she has helped rebuild Ba Sing Se’s wall and other structures. Occasionally Aang would make an odd stop and she would help tend a garden or two or watch a hippo cow for a day. Small mundane tasks but the people always smile at her as though she has showered them with gold. She doesn’t understand, she isn’t that good of company.   
She isn’t good company at all.   
No one has the heart to tell her. 

Heart.   
She clutches at her chest as she tries to sleep.  
Sometimes she remembers what it is like to not have a heart and she doesn’t sleep. She feels eyes all over her. She feels violated and helpless. 

Aang usually holds her on those nights and she doesn’t push him away. Even then she still can’t bring herself to speak much during their travels. Every now and again when he exclaims, “look how beautiful that sunset is!” Or, “I’ve never seen a meadow that green!” She will nod and say, “yeah, it’s nice.” 

She appreciates his attempts to cheer her but she hasn’t felt happy since her death. She isn’t sure that she is able to anymore. She only feels varying degrees fear and dismay.

One day they visit one of the first farms that she helped tend. They remember her and they do it with fondness rather than fear. Granted they remember her as the one with the sad and tired eyes. But they tell her that she had saved them from losing their farm and that--for some reason--their son likes her.   
She vaguely remembers him. She had gone through the motions of play with him. It was a pretend battle and she’d let him win. 

She guesses that this is why he asks her to play soldier with him again. He is always smiling, always enthusiastic. He boldly declares that, “I’ve always wanted to fight a real fire nation soldier!”

She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that it’s better if he never has to. Instead she says, “I was a soldier.” 

“Prove it!” 

And she lowers her collar just enough to show him the edge of her scar. 

His face lights up even further. “I beat a real soldier in battle!?”

She nods. 

He beams up at her with more joy than she has ever seen on anyone. He startles her when he throws himself at her and wraps her up in a tight hug. That is the first time she felt something like happiness. 

.oOo. 

Azula still doesn’t say much but she smiles every now and again. Zuko and Aang, and the lot of them have come to accept that she is simply a silent person now. She wasn’t very loud to begin with. 

Generally, she gets along with most people and most people don’t look at her with fear anymore. Typically they seem rather indifferent towards her, and she doesn’t particularly mind. As time progresses she comes to realize that people actually like to talk to her.  
She doesn’t know why at first. 

They, most of the time strangers, walk up to her and just start talking. They tell her things; sad things, embarrassing things, what makes them angry or stressed. Once in a while they will tell her a funny or happy story and she will offer a simple, albeit awkward, congratulations.   
She doesn’t have to say anything at all and she finds that they usually prefer it that way. 

She realizes that they like her because she listens.   
She listens and says nothing; no condescending advice, no judgement.   
Only subtle nods and someone to vent to. She is good at keeping secrets. 

Azula gives them an ear to listen and they give her company. With so many stories and confessions in her mind, she doesn’t think too much of the Spirit World. When she does think of it, of that cruel brain and those horrible eyes, she falls apart. Aang knows exactly what she is thinking about and she will only talk to him. Because he already knows. He has already seen…

He cradles her in his arms and insists that it will be alright. That she is a good person and that she won’t have to worry about those spirits again. He hugs her and eventually, he kisses her. And then it comes out, all of the grisly details and all of the emotions that continuously afflict her. 

She talks more after that. 

And by forty years, she finds stability, normalcy. She continues to travel the world with Aang and when she is home she continues to let people dump stories and troubles on her. She visits the boy again and comes to know him as Bo-yuk, he is in his late teens now and she teaches him to fight. 

By forty-five years she has established herself as a therapist and specializes with coaxing conversation out of those who had been written off as lost causes, out of the catatonic. 

She doesn’t think about the brain spirit until she is well into her eighties. Aang had passed some twenty years before and she had taken to teaching the new Avatar to firebend. She picked up on it much quicker than Aang ever did. But those days had come to pass too, she had practiced her firebending well into old age but she had reached her limit at eighty-one. 

Azula is tired, very much so. Katara is by her side and assures her that Zuko and Aang are both waiting and that she and Toph will probably be on their way soon. It is at the beginning of her final breath that she thinks about the brain and those eyes. 

For a moment she is petrified.   
And when she wakes in the Spirit World she is tearful.   
And just as he always has, Aang takes her into his arms and promises that she will be okay.


	18. It Means Everything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Mutated  
> Fandom: Legend Of Korra  
> Summary: Guan captures Kuvira and injects her with juice from the spirit vines.

Korra cradles Kuvira in her arms. The woman looks up at her and tries to smile, though her eyes hint at a pain that the Avatar can't quite comprehend. "Did I fix things? Did I...stop him?" She winces. "I think that I did."

"Yeah, Kuvira, Guan's dead."

Her eyes flash with confusion. "Dead?"

Korra nods.

"Did I…?"

Korra nods again. She looks into the woman's eyes, one of them still glints purple, the other is its usual green. She isn't sure that Kuvria will ever be truly herself again; at least not outwardly. "What did he do to you?" She rests the back of her hand against Kuvira's cheek.

Kuvira's brows furrow. "He had these syringes full of spirit vine juice." She begins, eyes growing distant as she tries to recall. "After his brainwashing device had no effect he injected me with those and then…"

"You don't remember do you?"

Kuvira shakes her head. Korra squeezes her hand. She can't help but think back to the night she'd initially taken the Uniter down. She'd been venerable, small. This is a little different, their is an air of pride that cuts through her weakness.

"Do you think that the rest of them will stand down now."

Korra looks around at the carnage. The gore is all over, limbs strewn about amid gooey organs and stomped hearts. There aren't many people left to stand down but she doesn't have the heart to tell Kuvira yet. "I think so." Not all of them were human, there is more yellow-green blood in the mix, Kuvira had been fighting fellow mutants too. Korra is inclined to say that the majority of her kills had been mutants as well.

Kuvira's lips curl into a soft smile. "Wonderful, Avatar. Maybe now people won't resent me anymore."

"Maybe." Korra replies.

Kuvira closes her eyes, Korra can still see a soft purple glow beneath the lid of the left one. After it goes limp, Korra removes Kuvira's hand from where she had it clutching her side. Her glove comes away smeared with a yellow-green and purpled tinged ooze. Korra realizes with alarm that this is the woman's blood.

She shouldn't be surprised considering much of her body has warped. It is mostly confined to the left side of her body, and truly she is still mostly human. Even still, the mutation is painfully apparent. Kuvira has always been a toned woman, aesthetically so. But the bulging of muscles on her left arm, leg, and chest are grotesque. Bizarre and ill-proportioned. The muscle tissue seems to weep from her skin and, where it connects to the right side of her body, has a texture like stretched bubblegum. In places, mostly along her neck and biceps, Korra can see veins of purple. But her face is normal, normal except for the magenta of her left iris.

And when she opens her eyes again, she still acts like Kuvira. Still talks like Kuvira with her elegant yet boyish charm. "I don't feel well, Avatar."

"Yeah, you took a few bad hits. Katara should be here soon, you'll be alright."

"I better be. Who else is going to make you look like a wimp…" she coughs. "When we got to the gym, Asami?"

"Asami could kick both of our asses and you know it."

She gives another weak smile.

"Tell me the truth, Korra. What did I do?"

Korra looks at the bloody mess around her. And for a moment she sees a hulking figure standing at the end of the hallway, accented by purple with tendrils of spirit vine wriggling from its chest. She shudders away a sudden wave of paranoia, a dread that that figure might step forward and slam a vine straight through her. She shakes her head, that figure is significantly smaller now and nuzzled against her chest almost like a child.

"You did a lot of damage, that's what." She answers. "I don't think that you would have if they just let you be…"

"I killed more people than just Guan."

It wasn't a question so Korra simply confirms. "Just the ones that came after you first." She lies. "I don't think that you would have done it if you were in control. How many times did he inject you anyways?"

Kuvira seems to mull it over. "Several times a day. I think twice, sometimes thrice."

Korra thinks that it is a miracle that the woman isn't fully mutated beyond recognition. She has a suspicion that, at one point or another, she had been. "Well, the healers were able to get the poison out of me so hopefully they can do that for you."

"I'm not going back to prison?"

"Not if I can help it."

**.oOo.**

She still doesn't bleed normal. She discovers this after Korra accidentally punches her nose sparing. She hears a soft crunch and then comes a flow of what should be red. Instead she sees yellow-green with a soft glow of purple.

It turns her stomach. Korra thinks that she is being dramatic in her distress until she looks and the avatar gets a good view of the inhuman blood that runs down her chin and coats her hands. "It isn't right, avatar…" she mumbles. "It's supposed to be red."

She doesn't know why she expected any different, not when she is looking at a left hand that is significantly larger than the right. Not when she looks in the mirror and sees something misshapen and awful. But for some reason, she expected to be human on the inside. To bleed like a human.

Korra rubs her back. "How about we take care of that? I'm not the best healer but I think that I can fix your nose."

"Go on." She holds still and lets the avatar get to it.

"There." She says upon finishing. "All healed."

"More water?" She holds out a rag and Korra wets it. Kuvira scrubs the blood off of her face and hands.

"Feel better."

"Not really, avatar." She confesses. Any day where reminders are heavy is an awful day and this one has only just begun.

Korra bends down and kisses her forehead. "How about now?"

"A little, I suppose." She replies. Kisses and affection in general do make her feel more human, if only slightly.

Korra looks at the bloody cloth and the back at her. "You're still you and that's what matters, you know that right?"

That should be all that matters, she agrees. But it doesn't, people avoid her more than ever. She vocalises this to Korra.

"Are they avoiding you or are you avoiding them?"

"Excuse me." She stiffens.

"Kuriva, I can't remember the last time you left this house."

"I can't remember the last time I wasn't under house arrest."

Korra slaps her own forehead and Kuvira very nearly doesn the same.

"I suppose that, that makes it difficult for people to try to talk to me, doesn't it?"

"Ya don't say." Korra laughs. "Well think about it this way, dinners are normal, right?"

Kuvira nods. They are mostly, she supposes that the level of awkward tension is on par with what it probably should be for conversing with family and an ex-lover that she'd nearly murdered. They don't usually bring up the mutation. Baatar speaks of it only once, it had been more or less an innocent question born of curiosity. But it left her feeling hollow, like a test subject. More so than usual. "For the most part they are...bearable."

Korra tucks the loose strands of Kuvira's hair behind her ears. "It doesn't bother me." She lets her fingers linger upon her neck where ruined and stretched flesh meets smooth skin.

"At least I'll have that." Kuvira musters a smile. She wraps her arms around Korra, taking the care not to squeeze too tightly. She presses her ear against the Avatar's torso.

"You going to let me sit down?" Korra asks eventually.

Kuvira loosens her hold and pats her lap. Korra takes her seat. "Comfortable?"

"Sure am." Korra replies. She takes to massaging Kuvira's biceps. "Honestly, you should try looking at the positives."

"Positives?"

"You've been trying to outdo me at one-armed push ups for ages now."

Kuvira gives a haughty sniff. "Cheating doesn't count."

"But apparently it works."

"Funny, avatar." She rolls her eyes.

"Really though, this doesn't bother me." Korra trails h


	19. A Forgotten Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Accident  
> Fandom: Voltron   
> Summary: Acxa gets into a spaceship crash.

Alarms scream and buzz as though she can do anything to stop the incoming damage. As though she can repair the damage that has been done already. She knows what is going to happen to her. It is the fate that has befallen may before her; usually the neck snaps or the head is severed. Those are the good fates. Less pleasing is the fiery explosion. She doesn’t like the idea of watching her skin blaken and melting away until her eyes run down her cheeks. But this is still preferable to slamming her face against he dashboard and taking in a headful of glass and then waiting to bleed out as the lights of the craft flicker out. 

Worse still are the cases where a piece of the craft throws itself through the body and pins the driver to their seat. 

She doesn’t have much time to do so, but she thinks of all of these possibilities as the ship powers down. She isn’t sure what has gone amiss, only that her craft is being sucked into the gravity of the nearest moon. She is going to crash. 

Likely she is going to die. 

This far out and off course, she knows what her odds look like. 

They look like her craft hitting the rock and turning over and over again. And smoke billowing from wreckage. 

They sound like the shattering of glass and the crunching of metal and a few muffled cries. They sound like a droning alarm and an engine powering down. 

They feel like broken bones and bruised heads and then they feel like nothing at all.

When she reawakens it is to the sight of blood on the dashboard and a cracked windshield. She is slumped over and she is, indeed, tethered to her chair by a beam of broken metal. 

She grows more deeply aware of what her odds are. It is cold, her breath fogs up the glass. She fixes her eyes on the distant stars. They glimmer and wink around her and for a moment things are peaceful. For a moment she is okay. This is only because she is still in a haze, her forehead trickles blood from where it had smacked against the control panel. Her nose is dripping too, likely broken. She thinks that much of her is broken, at least and arm and a leg as well. 

Her head gives another spin and the stars seem to swirl, reaching down to her, perhaps to reassure her. And then her vision blurs. Her moment of soothing winks out at the last moment and she goes into the blackness with only horror. The realization that even if she does awaken and can pull herself free and close her wounds that she will starve or dehydrate. That it will be slow and inglorious. That no one will find her.

A part of her hopes that she will simply stay asleep. She has already survived one crash landing inside of a weblum. She can’t see herself getting lucky a second time. Her head hangs limp and droplets of blood patter onto her lap.

Acxa does wake up, she isn’t sure how long it has been. She thinks at least a few hours because of the dull ache in her belly. She is bleeding profusely and she doesn’t think that she has long. She finds herself grasping at the metal beam buried in her deltoid muscle. It hurts so dreadfully that she thinks she may throw up. 

She smells the smoke before she notices that the ship’s engine has caught fire. Perhaps it will be over sooner than she knows. She throws her head back and lightly knocks it against the headrest a few times. 

She closes her eyes and resigns herself to what she needs to do. She inhales deeply and throws herself forward. With a slurping, sucking noise and a spray of blood, her body comes free. 

Her vision begins to darken again, she fights to keep herself awake as she stoops down, scoops up a slab of metal, and staggers towards the fire. Her stagger comes to an abrupt halt when her leg breaks all the way. She falls with a thud and the hole near her shoulder sears. 

Alone and lost, she doesn’t have much to do other than dwell upon the pain and her ever looming demise. She takes her mind to a friendlier place; she thinks of Ezor and Zethrid and Keith. She even thinks of Lotor. But mostly she thinks of Veronica who she promised to come back to.

It is terribly lonely and everything is still. It makes her feel as though she is suspended in time, which is profoundly more petrifying when pain and hunger are her only companions. Not that she will know them for very long. 

She rubs her cheek against her arm and lets the darkness take her once more. Her blood is pooling quickly around her and she would like to be well and out before the fire reaches her shattered body. 

She tries not to be sad; truly she had lived a decent life. She had helped save the universe. She’d found companionship and salvaged relationships she thought to be doomed. She found love and had the chance to see the world. To learn of a new culture. 

She is relatively young to her own people, but to the humans she is ancient. So she can give herself the comfort of knowing that she has lived a long life so long as she doesn’t dwell on her Galra half. 

Even still, Acxa doesn’t want to die, not when her life is finally becoming kinder, more peaceful. Not when she has people to return to.

But those people don’t know where she is and the fire will reach her before anyone can. She will be just another memory. A statistic. A burn smudge and a bloodstain on the surface of a forgotten moon. 


	20. They Always Scratch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Suffocation   
> Fandom: Winx Club  
> Summary: Icy is buried alive.

They scratch.

They always scratch. 

Claw until their nails wear down and their fingers bleed. 

But she is not them. She is Icy and she will accept her fate as readily as a person can. At most she will only live for a couple of hours. A slow suffocation as her oxygen is consumed. She supposes that it is kind of peaceful down here, six feet under the chaotic frenzy of life on the surface. 

And it does appeal to her macabre tastes. She closes her eyes, just for the feeling of having them closed. It is already plenty dark. That sort of dark that her eyes will never adjust to. It is good for sleeping. 

She just wishes that she could remember how she got here. Had she died? She thinks that she had, or at least they thought that she had. Or maybe she’d finally went and pissed off the wrong person. That could very well be the case with how much she runs her mouth. In that case, she applauds the bastard who had the balls to do it. 

She reaches up and presses her hand against the cool velvet lining. If it is velvet then it can’t be the work of some angry fellow tired of her sarcastic quips and relentless insults. Someone had cared to make her burial pretty. 

They must think that she is dead already. She supposes that it is an easy mistake to make with her body so naturally cold. It is actually quite commonplace to bury users of ice magic alive. Their bodies...her body had the chill of algor mortis at birth. 

Ice magic.

If only they hadn’t taken it from her. Ripped it right from her soul as punishment for trying to take over the world again. Faintly she considers that she should have given up two attempts ago. She probably shouldn’t have tried the first time. 

Yeah, that probably would have been smarter. She had a pretty nice degree going for her, even if her attempt to achieve academic success had been little more than a cover up for her real ambitions. 

She laughs to herself, likely eating up an excess amount of her short oxygene supply. Clearly she had lost sight of her real goal if she had managed to make it to the top of her class. 

She tries again to think of how she could have died or been mistaken for dead. By God if it was something stupid like choking on a gumball, she probably deserves to be down here. Now, she wouldn’t mind recalling that she had choked on a lifesaver, an ironic death is a fun one. 

Most likely she’d been hit by some sort of spell or slipped some sort of potion that imitates the look and feel of death to such a t that it is impossible to discern it from a real death. 

Icy wonders if anyone had shown up to her funeral or if it was just Darcy, Stormy, and the funeral home staff. She supposes that it doesn’t really matter in the long run. It also doesn’t matter if her body can go any colder than it is in life, but she is curious all the same. 

That curiosity begins to taper off with her air supply. She thinks that she should feel more concern but she can’t particularly muster up the sense to care at all. 

The dizziness begins to settle in. 

She knows that her time is growing short when her head and chest begin to ache. At the last minute she begins to feel the fear that she should have all along. It has finally caught up to her that she truly is going to die, that this is real. That her lungs have nothing to fill on. 

But she has respected death in life, so death is kind to her. It steals her away before she can deeply dwell on the matter any further. 


	21. Slow Bite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Bitten   
> Fandom: Harry Potter  
> Summary: Vampire Bellatrix toys with Scabior.

Bellatrix hums softly to herself as she twirls a strand of the man’s hair around her an elegantly manicured finger. He is pleasing to the eye and he smells savory. She dips her head down and inhales, oh yes indeed, he smells lovely. She brings to her lips close to his ear, he shudders. She gives it a sample, just a small, little bite. 

He tastes sublime. 

“Scabior, is it, luv?”

“It is, madame Lestrange.” 

Her lips curves up and she drags her nail along his cheek. “So formal.”

He clears his throat but makes it no further. That is of no consequence to her, he is better when he isn’t speaking. The lot of them are. Really they are only good for screaming and scream he will, she can promise him that. 

She pushes him down and into the nearest armchair. He sinks into plush satin cushions, it will be the last pleasant sensation that he has before she tears into his delicate throat. “Have a glass.” She holds out a cup of wine. 

He shakes his head. 

Her smirk widens, she is glad for his refusal. The wine usually dulls the pain and that is so much less fun. 

“So what will it be, then?” She asks. “Will you struggle or are you the passive sort?” She takes him for the fighting sort, it is why she had chosen him. He wants her to bring his fist to her mouth and to her jaw. She wants to feel the bruises rise on her skin. 

His answer is a true delight. His strike lands under her chin and she staggers back a fantastic hit. She allows herself the theatrics of falling back into the bookshelf. A few texts fall and smack her on the way down. 

His face grows smug and her eyes glimmer with delight. 

She lays on the floor until he looms over her. She lets him kick her in the ribs several times before she grabs his ankle. “Really, that’s no way to treat your host. To think I’ve been so hospitable.” She sing songs and gives his ankle a yank. 

His head gives a satisfying crack as it meets the floor. She hopes that he isn’t dead. Not yet. That would be such a bore. She stands up and smoothes her dress before stooping back down to check his pulse. 

It throbs enticingly, she can feel the blood beating. Begging her to stop playing around and drink. 

**.oOo.**

She cups his chin and tilts his head so that he may look at her. And look he does. So this is Bellatrix Lestrange. She is every bit as darkly enthralling and macabrely gorgeous as he had heard. 

But she is a wicked and vile woman. Disgusting on the inside. He loathes her and he loathes what she is going to do to him. He resents how deceitfully kind her touch is. How intoxicating her scent is--no doubt a lavishly pricey perfume. Mostly he hates the way she moves. It is so calculated. She dazzles him with supple curves. A view so generous that he almost wants her to bite into his neck. 

Her nails dig into his scalp and yanks his head back and he comes back to himself. He recalls the thin lines that her nails have already raked on his skin. The dent she his put in his skull, he is still seeing fuzz in the corner of his eyes. 

He knows her to play with her food. 

Especially the food that she finds intriguing. 

He thinks that he will be here for days. 

But he feels the pierce of her fangs. 

**.oOo.**

Bellatrix pulls back and inhales deeply. Oh yes, this one tastes grand. She hasn’t had blood so rich in ages. By all means, she is quite fond of making a good and bloody mess of the throat. But she wants to savor this one. To lick and lap at it, to suckle from it for as long as she can possibly. 

And she can keep him alive, yes she can.

The only thing she is better at than killing a man is keeping him alive. 

Her eyes flash red as she licks up the blood. She takes another sip but this time from his shoulders. It certainly won’t do to bleed him dry on the first night, so shoulders it is. She drags her fangs down the length of his arm, just deep enough to break skin and spill that enticing line of crimson. 

She slowly traces her tongue over it. She can’t argue with the curves and contours of a well muscled arm. She drums her fingers upon his chest. “You’re an enthralling man, Scabior. If I had a soul I would wrap it around yours.” Her eyes bare into him. Briefly she tries to remember what it was like to be human, what it was like to have a soul. 

She concludes that it wasn’t nearly as thrilling as undeath. 

“I should very much like to keep you around.” She purrs. “For as long as I can, luv. How would you like that?”

“That sounds perfectly dread…”

She holds her pointer to his lips and tsks. “No, luv. Prey is much less appetizing when it speaks. The only thing that you’ll be using those pretty lips of yours for is to scream and beg.” 

Bellatrix helps herself to one last sip before locking him away. And there it is, the song of the damned and god forsaken. Those harmonious screams and melodious mercy pleas. She lingers in front of the door and closes her eyes, drinking in the music. 

She licks the corner of her mouth as her fangs retract and brown comes back to her irises. She hasn’t had this much fun since she drained her lord. 


End file.
